\etail/\dverjising 

JrUGGISTS ahd^IATIONER? 

BY 
*RM\ "XRRINGTON 




Class ^.U^ 

Book .B-lf-k 

GojyrightN 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

for 
DRUGGISTS and STATIONERS 



Retail Advertising 

for 

Druggists and Stationers 



BY 



FRANK FARRINGTON 




NEW YORK 
THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO. 

UNION SQUARE (NORTH) 
33-37 East i 7th Street 



M 



HFt,n>i 
.Hit 9 *- 



THF LIBRARY OF 

MGSESS, 
Two CwHdJ Received 

NOV. 9 1901 

CnrvwiQHT ENTRY 

CLAS9 Ct XXa No. 






/ 7 yt>o 

copy a 



Copyright 1901 by 
The Baker and Taylor Co. 



THE EXCUSE 

PEOPLE who write books seem always to 
put in an excuse labeled " Introduction." 
I will put in an introduction labeled " Excuse." 

This little book is for people who want to 
advertise. It is a plain talk between you and me 
without even the editorial " we " between us. 

If I may blow one or two blasts on my own 
horn, they amount to this; — I have been in the 
drug and stationery business (with their side 
lines) for twelve years, and what I have not 
learned about them yet would make a whole 
library of bigger books than this one. 

The point though, isn't what I've not learned 
but what I have learned. If I can help you by 
the practical pointers in the pages to follow, we 
will both be glad; if I cannot we will both be 
sorry. 

If I had my way, this book would be sold on 
the " money back if you want it " plan, but the 

5 



THE EXCUSE 

publishers object. They say books aren't put 
out in that way. 

I have tried to avoid rhetorical fireworks and 
talk straight to the point on every page. If you 
have a complaint after taking my advice I shall 
want to hear it. Complaints are the paving 
stones of the road to perfection — perfection in 
the complainee, I mean. 

The lines of business covered here are, in a 
general way, drugs and stationery, but they 
mean much more. Drugs mean soda water, 
candy and cigars beside the regular stock. Sta- 
tionery means not only writing paper, but books, 
magazines, and all the appurtenances of each, 
and much else in the way of odds and ends with 
profit attached. 

Frequently all this goes as a drug store. 

The proprietor of almost any moderate busi- 
ness can apply every principle herein set forth to 
his own store, so that I am covering a wider field 

than at first appears. 

Frank Farrington. 
Delhi, N. Y. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Excuse 5 

I 

In a General Way 9 

II 

Newspaper Advertising . . . .23 

III 

Circular Advertising 65 

IV 

Window Displays . 116 

V 

Odds and Ends 148 

VI 

Store Management 168 

VII 

One Hundred Sample Ads .... 187 

7 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

for 

DRUGGISTS and STATIONERS 



I 



I 

In a General Way 
N a general way — advertise and keep adver- 



tising until you have made enough money. 
The people who have made money by advertising 
are countless; the people who have lost money 
in advertising — well, there are lots of them, 
too. 

Look in the magazines. There you will find 
the ads that are money makers and the ads that 
are money losers. You won't be able to tell 
which are which, but they are all worth study- 

9 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

ing. The most expensive ads and the most strik- 
ing ones sometimes pay the least profit. 

It is commonly supposed that the magazine 
advertisement is the highest type of perfection 
in the modern art of advertising, but even the 
best magazines have some terrible examples of 
how such work should not be done. 

Some of the greatest sensations in the adver- 
tising world have been caused by the spending 
of enormous sums of money in some advertising 
scheme which failed utterly except as a method 
of distributing wealth. Articles of apparent 
worth have been heralded by tons of printers' 
ink spread over acres of paper until their names 
were household words, and yet they did not sell. 
A modest quarter page in a cheap magazine has 
made an overwhelming demand for some article 
of almost no worth. These are the extremes. 

Anyway the bigger advertising does not come 
within our province. You and I are the little ad- 
vertisers who advertise by the one, tw T o, or ten 

10 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

dollars worth. We are the little fish who have 
been talked about in a vague, indefinite way as 
being eaten up by the big ones. We are here yet 
though, and while we wait for the big ones to 
swallow us, we must live. If in the meanwhile 
we can get our growth, we will be in a position to 
do a little swallowing on our own account. 

To the man in the store, the value of adver- 
tising is not in proportion to its size; it is in 
proportion to its persistency. Persistence after 
all is what counts. It is the keynote of success- 
ful advertising, as it is of successful anything. 
Just study up the persistency question a little on 
the side when you have time. By persistency I 
don't mean putting an ad in your paper and per- 
sisting in keeping it there until the face wears 
off of the type. I mean persistent hustling, 
hustling persistency and continual effort. 

I am not going to tell you of the uselessness 
of the old style newspaper ad that went into 
the local paper w r hen the merchant went into 

11 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

business and stayed until his assignee ordered 
it stopped. If you are that sort of an advertiser 
you never will bother to read this book — prob- 
ably never will hear of it. The necessity of fre- 
quent change of ads has been harped upon so 
much for a few years now that it is a trite sub- 
ject to mention, but I want to read you a little 
lecture on forgetting to change the ad that you 
meant to change. 

I know a man who has started in three times 
to advertise his store — started well too — and 
has each time changed his ads regularly for sev- 
eral weeks only to begin to let them run over 
once or twice, then more times and more, until 
they have died a natural death and been taken 
out because the printer couldn't collect his bill. 
That man, I suppose, lacked persistence. I don't 
believe " shif less " would be far from his size, 
really. Forgetfulness will become shiftlessness 
as sure as it is permitted to have its way. 

I live in a small town and a hustling town but 

12 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Fve seen Christmas present ads run straight 
through the year and hammock ads last all 
winter. 

I could name plenty of such cases where mer- 
chants have made their advertising space adver- 
tise their shiftlessness and nothing else. Those 
same men are pretty apt to have a store window 
that would look better with the curtain down. 

It will take a lot of advertising to overcome 
the effect of a dirty show window, unchanged 
and unchangeable. I don't know that it can be 
overcome. 

When you begin to advertise, don't look for 
results as soon as the first man has read your 
advertisement. One of my fellow merchants was 
asked to advertise in a local paper but replied, 

" No, I guess I won't try it again. I put an 
advertisement in the paper once and I never 
could see that it did any good. Everybody knows 
that I am here and if they want to trade with 
me they'll come and do it." 

13 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Of course. Probably the advertisement didn't 
do him any good. As like as not there didn't half 
a dozen people see it. Once! why, you can't stop 
the crowd by shouting once, you've got to keep 
on shouting, and probably then you will need 
to get out and grab hold of them to get their 
attention at first. 

When you were a boy and your mother called 
you in from playing " hi-spy " with the neigh- 
bor's children, did she say in a mild voice, back 
in the house somewhere — " Johnny?" 

No sir-ee, sue got out on the piazza and 
shouted at the top of her lungs, — " Johnne-e-e ! " 
No answer. " Johnny ! " No answer. " John ! " 
Still no reply. " John Harold Smith, if you 
don't come in here at once, I'll see that you 

," but by that time you had heard and 

started. 

That's the way to advertise, but you don't 
need to bear on quite so hard at that last call. 
Just keep up the " John " a little longer and the 

14 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

customer will come unless you have fooled him 
some time in the past. 

A store can be run successfully, or fairly so, 
without advertising, but it is the rare exception. 

The man who does not advertise will, ninety- 
nine times in a hundred, go to the wall and no 
one will miss him. He won't even make a spot 
on the wall. 

In the days w r hen no one advertised, if there 
ever were such days, the man who could extol 
best by word of mouth the virtues of his wares, 
sold the most goods. The oriental silk merchant 
who displayed his damask stuffs most attrac- 
tively in his narrow street stall, won the cream 
of the trade from his more easy going neighbor. 
Display of goods still cuts a most important 
figure in selling but it must be supplemented by 
(or better, supplement) advertising. 

Druggists have a good deal of professional 
dignity which is a good thing in small quantities. 
They are inclined to feel themselves above the 

15 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

common ways of tradespeople. Folks who feel 
above, no matter what they're above, if it's 
honest, are pretty apt to be lonesome and there's 
no money in being lonesome. To get money 
you've got to mingle with the rest of the money- 
getters. Some of them are not pleasant com- 
panions, but that has no bearing on the case. 

The more people you can know personally, the 
greater can be your hold upon your trade. 
When a man has been in business in a small town 
for a year or two he can bow to every man he 
meets on the street. They all know T him even if 
he does not know them. 

The merchant who greets a working man 
effusively in the store and fails to recognize him 
on the street, will lose that man's trade. The 
opinion which the laborer will form may be 
unjust, but the result is the same. If you are 
running a store you can't afford to be haughty 
or put on airs, and if your eyesight is poor get a 
pair of glasses. 

16 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

In a small town every individual is a recog- 
nized part of the community. None is so humble 
that he may not complain of his trifling troubles 
directly into the ears of the highest. The class 
and mass distinction is gradual. There is want- 
ing the sharp, distinct dividing line of the larger 
communities. 

City and country advertising must necessarily 
be very different, but there aren't many cities 
large enough to be too large for the small dealer 
to get for his store a reputation which shall ex- 
tend over at least all the available territory. 

On the other hand the littleness of your town 
is not the hamper that you think it is. I know of 
a big store that does a hundred thousand dollars 
business every year in a village of 500. I know 
of a drug store not far from my own town that 
gets $23,000.00 cash receipts per annum in a 
place of from 2,500 to 3,000 inhabitants and 
there are two other druggists too. 

There are great possibilities in any town for 

17 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

the persistent hustler. You can't get rich quick 
by advertising. If you are anxious to get rich 
quick you will have to gamble. If a gambler gets 
rich at all, it is done quickly. Your business 
isn't a gamble, but it will pay you to take some 
chances. Nothing venture, nothing gain. 

In the moderate sized town the druggist has 
the chance of becoming a distinct personality. 
He can impress his individuality so upon his 
advertising as to become more than merely the 
man who runs a drug store on such a corner. 
The druggist has that opportunity to a greater 
extent than any other store-keeper. 

Most druggists sell stationery and many of 
them conduct a news stand. All stationers run 
a news department, This makes the three busi- 
nesses so nearly allied that I am treating them 
all in the same book. Stationery can be made 
a valuable line for the druggist. He is well able 
to handle it and is usually well equipped to dis- 
play it. 

18 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

It hardly seems necessary to argue with a 
man to show him the value of advertising and yet 
it is surprising how many business men are 
letting their opportunities slip by, satisfied with 
a living when they might be laying up for the 
traditional rainy day. 

The country merchant has many advantages, 
in his advertising possibilities, over his city 
brother. The question of expense is not so seri- 
ous with us of the smaller places. The local 
papers are usually reasonable in their rates to 
home merchants which places the most valuable 
of all forms of advertising within reach of the 
poorest. If you want circulars distributed from 
house to house, it is practical in the village, at a 
low price. In the city it is not practical at any 
price. The country dealer knows his competi- 
tion pretty thoroughly and knows the personal 
tastes of his customers. He knows too, the per- 
sonal tastes of the other fellow's customers 
whom he wants to get. 

19 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Advertising is not for to-day. It is building 
for future days and years. Don't be in a hurry 
about it. Build well or the structure will fall 
on your head. Make your advertising consist- 
ent. Don't fool your customers. They won't 
come twice to a store that has fooled them with 
advertisements of bargains it didn't give. 

I know of a men's furnishing goods store 
which advertised " Big Clearance Sale." I went 
in one day and bought some ties, suspenders, 
etc., to the amount of three or four dollars. The 
discount that I received on account of the " Big 
Clearance Sale " was five cents off on one neck- 
tie, a small incident but it showed a niggardly 
policy which, to say the least, is a severe handi- 
cap. If you advertise bargains, give bargains 
even if you have to sacrifice some staple stock. 
The other policy will lose you more money than 
you could lose on a few sales at less than 
cost. 

Don't advertise insect powder in December — 

20 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

it won't pay you. I've seen furs pushed in July 
by a big house, and sold too, but you can't gage 
your advertising by that of a department 
store. 

Get all your store improvements commented 
upon in the news columns of your papers. It 
will cost you nothing and it all counts. Watch 
every chance to familiarize people with your 
store and store methods, but bear in mind that 
any advertising that tends to induce a customer 
to pay more for an article than it is worth will 
prove a boomerang. 

Be generous enough to let your competitor 
have the ad on the hotel register, the directory, 
and the elephant in the circus parade, but don't 
turn down church affairs and other public pro- 
grams because, while the advertisement itself is 
valueless, the good will of the promoters is worth 
keeping a,t the small expense. It is a sort of 
blackmail, but be cheerful under it. Above all 
be quick to decide whether you will go into the 

21 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

scheme presented and don't go in grudgingly. 
You lose the credit of taking hold and the money 
as well. If you're going to give, give cheerfully 
and get all the good will you can out of it. 



22 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

II 

Newspaper Advertising 

npHE newspaper is the old reliable advertising 
medium. Rightly used it is a money 
maker; wrongly used, it is a money loser every 
time. Are you using your papers at all? Are 
you using them right? Are you working them 
for all they're worth? If you are going to use 
your local papers, see that you get all out of 
them that there is in them. 

Suppose your best local weekly paper charges 
you ten dollars a year for a three inch space, 
single column, next to reading matter. That 
size space is all right for a beginner at ad writ- 
ing (it's easy to increase the space if you need 
to). 

Suppose that paper goes to 1,500 subscribers. 
Perhaps 1,000 of them are within reach of your 

23 



EETAIL ADVERTISING 

store, perhaps more; anyway that means prob- 
ably 3,000 readers and possible customers 
reached 52 times every year. 

If your advertisement runs over a week with- 
out changing, you miss the chance (paid for just 
the same) of saying something telling to two or 
three thousand people. 

If your ad runs a year unchanged you are 
paying the same to tell those 3,000 people one 
thing about your store that your neighbor who 
changes every week, pays to have 52 little talks 
with them. In other words he pays about twenty 
cents a talk and you pay ten dollars. 

If the telephone operator charged you ten 
dollars for the same time and distance use of 
the instrument that the man just ahead of you 
had paid twenty cents for, you would kick. You 
wouldn't pay it. In the newspaper case you 
are charged in practically the same way and you 
pay it without even kicking. It looks rather 
foolish, doesn't it? 

24 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

You leave your ad for the people to read a 
second time when you know that they wouldn't 
read even news matter a second time. Do you 
suppose that people are more interested in your 
ads than in news? 

No sir ! Ads must be fresh. Stale ads, stale 
goods ; fresh ads, fresh goods. It's sure to be so. 
If the ads stand over, so will the goods. 

If you were selling nothing but oil of pepper- 
mint or horse-shoe clips you wouldn't need to 
let your ads repeat. You have enough things to 
talk about unless your store is empty. 

If your store does not have many seasonable 
goods — make them seasonable. You don't need 
a lot of special writing paper with Easter eggs 
all over it in order to advertise Easter stationery. 
Take one of your regular brands as a leader for 
the week. Fill up your window and use a lot 
of purple crepe tissue and a few appropriate 
mottoes ; " Easter paper for Easter letters ; " 
" Are you an Easter letter writer? " " Send a 

25 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

note of thanks for the Easter gift! " etc. Put the 
same sentiment in your newspaper space. 

Easter is only one day. 

St. Valentine's day is not entirely a children's 
affair. Make your advertisement a valentine. 

Washington's and Lincoln's •birthdays every- 
one knows. Utilize some of the other great 
men's birthdays too. People always grasp at a 
stray bit of timely information put into an ad. 

Thomas Jefferson for instance. Push your 
fountain pens. Say, " Tuesday is Thomas Jef- 
ferson's birthday. We haven't the pen with 
which he signed the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, but here's our new dollar fountain pen 
that writes better than any pen the great Thomas 
ever saw, etc T " 

There's a bit of advice about newspaper ad- 
vertising and other advertising too, which is 
best expressed in the terse and slangy sentence, 
" Don't get gay." 

Remember you're not writing comic para- 

26 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

graphs. If you can be funny try it on the comic 
papers. They will pay you more for that sort 
of thing than advertising will, if it's good — 
which it probably isn't. 

A poor joke printed is a boomerang. A good 
one diverts attention from the business part of 
your ad. In general, people will call you fresh 
if you try to joke. 

Business is business. Don't mix horse-play 
with it. A little humor is another thing. The 
jew r eller who wrote " Watch our prices — price 
our watches " carried the thing just far enough, 
and even that paraphrase would make a better 
window card than newspaper ad. 

Don't try to be an advertising poet unless you 
are a poet and then your stuff is worth more 
to print in the literary columns than among the 
ads. 

Some people use poetry in that way with tell- 
ing results, but the chances are you will fail. 
You will be judged by your verses rather than 

27 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

your prices. The tyro will find nothing like 
plain straight talk — just as you say it over the 
counter, only in better language. 

If you are using a three inch single column 
ad, one article is about all you can handle at a 
time. If you find yourself doing that well, you 
can increase your space and advertise two or 
three articles or lines at once. It is better to 
increase your space up and down the column 
than to make it too broad. In a broad, double 
column space the tendency is to make your lines 
too long. Long lines are not so easily read. 

Put prices in your ads. You have got to do 
it or you will miss your mark. Advertise for a 
thousand years without a price and you will only 
get a one hundredth part of what you would 
draw with prices. 

People like to go into a store and say " Give 
me a pound of hellebore " and shove the money 
at you without having to ask how much it is. 

It may be hellebore, toilet water or the latest 

28 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

book. They like to feel that they needn't ask the 
price. 

I can't explain it but you know the feeling 
yourself. Walk along the street and look at the 
windows. You would go into a store and buy 
where the window had price tickets on what you 
wanted. You would simply trudge on with the 
money in your pocket if the price weren't there. 

The newspaper price simply begins farther 
back. It enables you to start out from home to 
go to a certain place for a certain thing, confi- 
dent in your financial ability to buy. 

You can advertise Roger and Gallet's Vera 
Violet at $1.10 and sell it when your competitor 
is keeping it at $1.00 because he does not men- 
tion his price when he advertises the perfume. 

Because you quote prices you needn't cut 
prices. The man who fears to quote a low T price 
on goods because it lets his competitor know 
what his price is, will never be a bold or success- 
ful advertiser. 

29 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Forget your competitors. They should not be 
a hamper. Suppose you are selling something 
for less than the next man and you quote a price 
which brings him down to your level. That's 
all right, the quotation will be seen by a lot of 
people who have been paying him the long price. 
Next time most of them will come to you straight 
without going to ask the other man if he is 
coming down to your figure The people who 
buy like to know prices in advance. 

Make your advertisements say something be- 
sides telling that your store is the best place to 
trade. That's a rather trite ad. The reader 
thinks — if there is a reader — " of course he'd 
say so." 

Prove it! Prove that your store is the best 
place to trade. To do that you must resort 
to figures as w T ell as facts. 

If you claim that your baking soda is better 
than the grocer's, prove it. Tell all the good 
reason's that you can state concisely and clinch 
the argument with a price. 

30 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

That not only shows that you think you are 
selling as cheap as the next man (perhaps no 
cheaper), but it also shows that you are not 
ashamed of your prices, that you do not con- 
sider them unreasonable. 

Prices are so generally quoted nowadays that 
the man who leaves them off is suspected of be- 
ing afraid that his are too high. 

I know a merchant who has spent more money 
perhaps than any other in his town in advertis- 
ing, but his results have been as nothing when 
compared to what he might have made them for 
the same investment. 

He has used newspapers, circulars, dodgers, 
sign-boards, posters and dozens of other schemes 
but never a price and rarely an argument. 

It has always been (and I guess will con- 
tinue to be) " Smith's is the best place to trade " ; 
" Great bargains at Smith's "; (never a bargain 
mentioned) " Smith has the best stock of this or 
that." Not a distinctive line in the columns 
and columns used. 

31 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Good money thrown away, pretty nearly. Lots 
of people know that Smith runs a store, but that 
isn't much. Most people know the stores any- 
way. In a small town everybody knows who is 
there. 

Advertisements that say nothing are worth 
nothing. Get a catch phrase the first thing you 
do when you begin to advertise. If you can't 
think up a good one yourself, get it done by some 
ad man. Get a good one or don't get any. 

" Money back if you want it " is all right, but 
too much used. Probably somebody in your 
town already uses it. 

If you are in the stationery business, try some- 
thing like, " A paper store for paper buyers ", or 
" Paper caterers ". If yours is a drug store try 
" Our drugs are Pure " ; " Smith's Pure Drug 
Store " ; " If it's wrong we'll make it right." 
" The money is yours if the goods aren't right." 

Be careful not to have the sentence too long. 
It should be short and pithy. There is some sen- 

32 



FOE DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

tence which is just adapted to your needs. Look 
till you find it and then use it on every ad that 
you get up. Make that sentence synonymous 
with the name of vour store. 

Be original ! Better a year of originality than 
a cycle of imitation. Whether your ads are 
weak or strong depends much upon their origin- 
ality. Don't copy your neighbor's schemes or 
methods. 

Remember you are striving for an individual- 
ity of your own. You don't want someone 
else's. 

The ways and words available for your uses 
are so infinite that you need not duplicate 
anyone. 

I do not mean by that that you need never use 
other people's ideas. What is this book for but 
to help you to use my ideas? That's not all 
though, When you get started, you will soon 
be overflowing with ideas of your own. If you 
have hard ^ork writing ads at first, study not 

33 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

only the sample ads herewith, but the magazine 
ads ; you can get lots of ideas there. 

It is the way in which you present other 
people's ideas that gives your advertising 
originality. 

If you have any literary ability, you will of 
course, unconsciously put a style into your ads, 
but without that ability, by observing a few 
rules of your own making you can develop 
originality. 

Make the mechanical part of your ads attract 
attention. If every ad around yours is set with- 
out a border or margin, or if you are next to 
reading matter, adopt the plan of using a white 
margin. 

If all the neighboring ads are set with a mar- 
gin, get a distinctive border and keep it around 

every ad. At any rate when you get your mind 

> 
settled upon some good style, stick to that 

style. 

Make it a stipulation when you get your news- 

34 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

paper contract that your ad shall always occupy 
the same position. 

People will look for an ad every week when 
it's always in the same spot. If it is always 
shifting about, they will only read it when they 
stumble upon it. Your idea should be to become 
a part of the paper, something that people will 
look for with interest. 

Don't let the printer put your ad where it 
will be part on each side of a fold in the paper — 
if you can help it. You have got to make it easy 
for your readers instead of difficult. 

If you are a new advertiser and if you live in 
a small town where the advertisers are a little 
slow, you will at first have a hard time to get 
your ads set up as you want them, but when once 
the printer understands thoroughly your idea 
there will not be much more trouble. 

There's a form of' newspaper advertising more 
expensive than the regular space, that it's worth 
while using when you have worked your other 

35 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

ads up to a creditable condition and that's the 
reading notice. 

Most local country papers charge 5 cents a 
line (figuring seven words to the line) set in 
the same columns with local new T s. If you want 
them set in italics the price will be higher. They 
may be w r orth more or may not, you will have 
to judge of that by experience. 

The reading notice is well adapted to special 
notice of special sales or special prices. Don't 
forget that it is available. 

Now that you have decided to advertise and 
know something about how to do it, what are 
you going to advertise? 

Let me suggest that you look through your 
stock and see what there is that does not sell 
as well as it should. 

Perhaps you are not getting your share of the 
trade in hair brushes. Where are people buying 
them and why don't they come to you? 

Those are good questions to apply first to any 
article you think of. 

36 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Perhaps they are getting them at a dry goods 
store that sells them for less profit than you do. 

Don't cut on patent medicines unless you have 
to, but don't be afraid to come down on the 
prices of anything else in your stock that is 
moving too slowly. It is likely that you are too 
high if you do not sell your share. 

Figure out a fair profit — you might better be 
selling goods at just a moderate profit than 
holding them for possible sales at too much 
profit. The former way will make you the most 
money. 

In a Pennsylvanian town there used to be a 
jeweller whose wife was wont to say, " Well, 
John doesn't sell very many watches, but when 
he does sell one he makes an awful profit." 

You don't want your wife to give you away 
like that. The drug business wouldn't stand it, 
sales are too small. 

Look your hair brushes over. If any are shop 
worn put the price away down. Don't be afraid 
v 37 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

to sell damaged goods for less than cost. The 
money ten minutes is better than the goods ten 
years. 

Before you go at the brush business see that 
you have a sufficient variety to meet all reason- 
able demands and then begin your advertising. 
Nothing is worse than to advertise goods, get a 
demand started for them, only to run out of 
stock and have to admit it to people who have 
come as a result of your advertising. 

Remember, in advertising brushes, or any- 
thing else, that odd prices are better than even 
prices ; 98c looks at least 15c less than a dollar. 

You can call attention in your brush ads to 
the fact that you have been in the brush busi- 
ness right along but want to sell more — afraid 
there are some people who didn't know you had 
them. 

You can sell brushes as cheap as anybody — 
same with all your other lines. 

Cigar advertising for the retailer does not pay 

38 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

as well as most things. I once inserted an ad 
to the effect that anyone clipping out that ad 
and bringing it in could buy three of a certain 
five cent cigar for ten cents (a $35.00 cigar). 
The only person who responded to the call was 
the publisher of the paper in which it appeared 
and he came and kept coming — one of those ads 
every day, some days twice, until I thought he 
must have printed a special edition of his paper 
that week, but I didn't kick. 

Still, a new brand of cigars can be helped very 
materially by good strong reading notices. Bet- 
ter with those than with ads in your regular 
space. 

Dye stuffs are among the seasonable things 
spring and fall. Package dyes don't pay the 
profits that the old-fashioned dyeing receipts do, 
so it is a good plan to talk quite a bit about the 
latter. 

Have a receipt book of your own and when 
the farmer's wife comes in and wants enough 

39 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

cutch to color ten pounds of carpet rags, you 
won't have to send her away because you don't 
know how much she needs. 

Of course you have to keep the package dyes, 
but advertising them would be a good deal like 
advertising Hood's Sarsaparilla — five words for 
Hood and one for yourself. 

Push the things there's a profit in. Be sure to 
get your seasonable goods going early. Have 
your hellebore on hand before the leaves on the 
currant bushes come out. 

Get your paris green in stock while the po- 
tatoes are yet below the surface. The early bird 
catches the worm. 

Don't neglect to have your own sarsaparilla; 
beef, iron and wine ; tooth powder ; cold cream ; 
etc., etc., and push them in every possible 
way. 

A sarsaparilla, if it's good, will stand a lot 
of advertising. Have it as good as, or better 
than the proprietary ones on your shelves and 

40 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

don't hesitate to recommend it — not only that 
but do better — guarantee it. Write an ad that 
will say ; " we guarantee our Sarsaparilla to be 
up to Hood's, Ayer's, anybody's, everybody's. If 
it doesn't suit you throw it away and we will 
give you back your money. We warrant it to 
make you well, keep you well. It's not a cure-all, 
but it is a spring medicine unequalled. 

"If you are buying sarsaparilla why not buy 
ours? You have nothing to lose. If it's not all 
you ask — here's your money." 

That will sell sarsaparilla for you. You take 
all the chances. They aren't many, either. Not 
one person in ten, even of those who think the 
medicine didn't help them, will ask for their 
money. 

You can afford to make that offer on every- 
one of your own preparations. See that every ad 
pushing your own preparations makes it plain 
that they are guaranteed to do good or " your 
money back." 

41 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Lots of business houses are cranky about that. 
They lose a customer every time they refuse to 
make good. 

How is your bird seed selling? There's money 
in that. Sell it in bulk — that's best. Have the 
packages too, for people who insist. 

Make your ad tell where the seeds grow, how 
they grow, how they get here. Show why the 
bulk seeds are best — you can see what they are. 
You know if they're clean, full weight in that 
way too. 

You will think of all sorts of things to say 
about all goods when you get started. 

The average customer is pretty ignorant on 
the subject of drugs and their derivation. Make 
your advertising a campaign of education. Tell 
people something worth knowing, something 
they will remember about everything you ad- 
vertise and they'll respect your knowledge. 

When a man comes into your store for cam- 
phor and asks you, " where the dickens does that 

42 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

stuff come from, anyway? " Don't put him off 
with a careless " Japan/' or answer in language 
he cannot understand, about stearoptens and the 
like. Tell him enough to give him an idea about 
it. You won't lose by the effort. 

I think that of all hard things to get rid of by 
newspaper advertising or by giving them away, 
dead patents are the worst. No one wants them 
at any price. Bargain prices are no induce- 
ment. 

One way and perhaps the best is to send to the 
manufacturers, if they are still in business for a 
supply of advertising matter ; or better get them 
to send literature to your mailing list. They 
will usually do it without any purchase on your 
part. 

That may move what stock you have or it 
may not sell a bottle. 

There are firms that take dead patents in ex- 
change but if you're not careful you'll get 
" deader " ones by trading. 

43 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

If your dead patents are shelf worn, send to 
the makers for fresh wrappers. 

Get one line of the dead ones down where 
they're handy and have your clerks sell them 
when there's a call for " something good for 
liver complaint " or other disease for which the 
medicine is recommended. 

Dead patents are a bad lot and you've got to 
get rid of them the best way you can. 

How is your sale on spices? Are the grocers 
selling them all? If they are, it's your own 
fault. 

Get hold of their prices and then get the best 
pure spices obtainable and sell them as near 
the grocer's prices as possible. 

People like purity in food stuffs as well as in 
medicines, and pure spices, in addition to being 
more wholesome are cheaper, even at a higher 
price because they go further. 

Tell all this in your ads, and more. Tell them 
about each spice, where it comes from and so on. 

44 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Keep up your campaign of education. Sell 
for grocery prices if you can. 

Flavoring extracts want the same treatment. 
You have the advantage of the grocer on those 
though. You make them yourself and can sell 
in bulk. People, especially the farming classes 
like to buy in bulk. They think it's cheaper and 
it usually is. 

Hot water bottles are good things for a bar- 
gain sale. Newspaper prices on a big lot of 
cheap hot water bags will bring people into your 
store and you can sell a good many of them good 
bottles when you have a chance to tell them the 
difference. Advertise. 

Here's Cheap Heat ! 

A hot water bottle for 58c. 

Two quart size. 

Nothing like them for whatever 

ails you in winter (summer 

either, for that matter). 

We bought a little less than 

45 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

a car load of them, hence 
the ridiculously low price. 
Better grades at proportionate 
prices, etc., etc. 

There are no goods more susceptible to ad- 
vertising than tooth supplies; brushes, powders 
and the like. People buy them often and are 
easily influenced by a good ad. 

Why it is I cannot say, but in my experience, 
brushes will always begin to move when a win- 
dow display is made and a good newspaper ad 
used. 

If you are a beginner, begin on tooth stuff. It 
will encourage you. 

Of course you have a powder of your own 
and sell in bulk too. Have your package at- 
tractive and of a generous size and guarantee 
satisfaction. 

Offer a combination of a brush and bottle of 
powder for so much. If people like your powder 
they will come back for more. They will recom- 
mend it to their friends too. 

46 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

If you're going to advertise chamois skins, I 
wouldn't try to explain that there are no real 
chamois skins any more— that they are all sheep 
skins. Your competitor might take the oppor- 
tunity to say that his are real chamois. 

Don't give the other fellow a chance to catch 
you off guard in that way, and don't, under any 
circumstances be led into referring to him even 
in the most roundabout way. 

You have enough to do to advertise your own 
business without using your space to boom your 
opposition as you'll do as sure as you refer to 
him in any way. 

Most young advertisers are tempted into that 
mistake some time or other. Perhaps a warning 
may stop you — it didn't me. 

How about stationery? 

Are your ream goods selling well? There's 
every argument in favor of people buying ream 
goods. You can tell them how much they save; 
how they avoid the waste of envelopes that goes 

47 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

with box paper. Tell them what ream goods are 
and why they should buy them. You will in- 
terest the other fellow's customers. It is the 
other fellow's customers that you are after. 
Keep that in mind. 

There are new tints and styles in note papers 
every little while. Keep up with them and keep 
your customers posted — not on the freak papers, 
but on the new styles that are really good form. 

Make your customers feel sufficient confi- 
dence in your judgment to be willing to take 
your word for what is correct in correspondence 
stationery without being obliged to refer to the 
" Ladies' Home Journal " to corroborate it. 

Call attention to the fact that you have the 
paper and envelopes for invitations. Give that 
fact a good position once and it will be remem- 
bered by people when they need that sort of 
thing for parties. 

Speaking of parties, don't forget to let the 
public know that you have tally cards and all 

48 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

such sundries. Tally cards, game counters and 
even playing cards will all go into one ad — if 
your space is of good size. 

You don't have to use cuts to make your ads 
attractive. They are expensive, particularly so 
if you get good ones of a sort that possess any 
merit. Don't use the cheap ordinary sort that 
have nothing but price to commend them. They 
may be of some advantage, but it isn't up to the 
cost of the cuts. 

There is one sort of newspaper advertising of 
which it isn't well for the druggist to have too 
much. That's the patent medicine advertisement 
over your name. You have nothing to say about 
what goes into the ad and yet it passes among 
readers as your work. 

In addition to the fact that too much of that 
prejudices the physicians against you, there is 
the objection, a serious one too that oftimes the 
ads are not what they should be. They are too 
frank. They discuss diseases which you wouldn't 

49 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

talk about in your own space. You get the dis- 
credit and lose the respect of the readers. 

Don't be afraid to advertise little things. For- 
tunes are made on little things — " Pigs-in- 
clover," 190,000.00 in a few months. 

Pens are small but you can sell them by ad- 
vertising and extra pen sales mean extra pen- 
holder, blotter and ink sales. 

Fountain pens are good subjects for advertis- 
ing. You can work up for a good dollar fountain 
pen, a demand that will surprise you. 

Fountain pen makers are liberal advertisers 
themselves and if you connect your own name 
with that of a prominent pen you will soon be 
known as the agent and people who have used 
that pen will come to you for repairs and for 
new pens. 

Lawyers' seals are not too small to advertise; 
neither are paper fasteners, eyelets, staples, 
thumb tacks — there's a thing lots of people don't 
know where to buy — thumb tacks. They w T ill 

50 



FOE DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

wander all around the town, from the under- 
takers to the grocers, trying to find them and 
like enough won't think of the stationer at 
all. 

Keep your customers posted on the latest and 
best selling books. The literary magazines and 
even some of the daily papers are continually 
printing the lists of best selling books. Why 
don't you put such a list in your ad space occa- 
sionally? It shows your readers that you are 
up-to-date. 

You can get much of the book trade that goes 
to the cities if you try. People like to buy books 
and everything else where they can see before 
buying and of someone who will let them ex- 
change books if they get one for a gift and find it 
already owned by the one they get it for. 

I sold an old lady a copy of " Garden of 
Swords " for a gift. She took it home and 
brought it back — it didn't please her. She had 
had cake crumbs between the fly leaves and it 

51 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

didn't look nice, but I took it and gave her some- 
thing else. 

I sold " Garden of Swords " for 35c — net loss 
on the whole transaction 45c, but with that 45c, 
bought a customer. 

Fight shy of the fakers who are always coming 
around with the new (?) advertising schemes; 
telephone directory; Hotel clock, call board, 
writing desk, etc. There's not a cent in those 
things for you — not a cent. You don't even get 
anyone's good will. You are simply posting 
yourself as an easy mark for the next man. 

Stick to your newspapers for the best results. 
It is the persistent hammering that brings suc- 
cess. One ad won't do the work, keep 'em 
going. 

You will find it a great advantage to make use 
of town affairs in your advertising. Don't pick 
out the Lenten season to push playing cards and 
whist manuals, use some common sense in such 
things. If a fever epidemic strikes the place, 

52 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

advertise all your disinfectants. If the boys 
get up some bicycle races, say 

After the Races 

use our rubbing stuff. 

All the fastest riders use it. 

Get one of the local cracks to let you say of him, 
" Smith, who holds the local mile record, says 
< It's simply great ! ' " 

Every bicycle rider will read the ad when he 
sees Smith's name and then, of course, you go on 
to say, " Even if you don't race you may fall off 
your wheel and there's nothing like that same 
rubbing stuff for such bruises, sprains, etc." 
Arnica, witch hazel and court plaster all come 
in for such an ad. 

If there's a big masquerade coming off, tell the 
people about masks, false faces and wigs. 

If the young folks are going into the amateur 
theatrical business, give them a few pointers on 
grease paints, face powders, etc. You don't re- 

53 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

quire much of a stock of grease paints to supply 
all that are needed. A single " dollar make-up 
box " might be enough. 

The little things are what get people coming 
for the larger items. 

Give a lead pencil talk occasionally, not one 
person in a thousand but uses a lead pencil. Not 
one in a hundred knows whether No. 2 is harder 
than No. 3, or softer. 

Scarcely a customer has ever heard of them as 
hard asVVVHorHHHHHH. Tell them 
the facts so that they can buy intelligently. 

You will find lots of purchasers will take a 
five cent pencil when they have been using penny 
ones because they thought the difference was all 
in the paint. 

Advertise the fact that you sell postage 
stamps. On holidays and after post office hours 
you will be a convenience worth while to lots of 
people. There's no profit in stamps but at any 
rate they will not become dead stock. 

54 



FOE DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

People expect a druggist to sell stamps and 
you might as well be good about it and get all 
there is in it. 

I know a city drug store where there is a 
branch post office for the sale of stamps. The 
government pays the proprietor a goodly sum per 
annum, when the proprietor would willingly pay 
the government as much rather than lose the 
extra trade it brings him. 

Of course the sale of stamps in a city 
store will bring in many more people than 
their sale in a country store. In the small 
towns every one is within easy reach of the post 
office. 

Soda water is a thing that is not usually ad- 
vertised enough or rightly. The newspaper soda 
ad generally says, " Our soda water is the best 
in the world." It does not attempt to prove it 
— probably the assertion is too broad to prove 
anyway. 

It doesn't describe a particular beverage in 

55 



EETAIL ADVERTISING 

such a way that people will go a dozen blocks 
to try it. Why not say, 

" Try our ' Mint Fizz.' It's a winner and 
only three days old at that. It has the mint 
flavor so perfect that you can see the plant 
growing by the side of the brook. You can 
even hear the brook ripple over the stones — 
if you listen sharp. Cold! of course it's 
cold. Isn't our soda always cold. Same 
price too as all our drinks. When you come 
to try it, bring a friend, or two friends, and 
if you aren't all glad you're living, after 
you've tasted ' Mint Fizz,' then we'll let you 
keep your money ! " 

Get people interested. Whether it's soda or 
sauerkraut, it's all the same until the reader is 
interested enough to read the ad through. 

Headlines go a long way toward making an 
advertisement a success. They get people to 
read it. 

Be your ad ever so clever, if no one reads it it 
is worthless. 

The heading should be such as will attract no- 

56 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

tice and at the same time indicate what you are 
advertising. 

Scare heads are to be avoided and all sorts of 
fake headlines. They fool the people and make 
it harder to get their attention next time. 

During the Spanish war a certain patent medi- 
cine house sent out window cards which would 
read something like this, 

Spanish Fleet 

not in sight, but our pills, etc., etc. 
We are not 

Captured 

but every one who captures a bottle of 
our, etc., etc. 

Those cards, where they struck a druggist 
foolish enough to use them, injured both the 
druggist and the patent medicine man. 

Such ad heads are boomerangs. 

If you want to advertise brushes, make your 
heading " Bristle Goods Prices " or " Brush 
Talk"; "Hair Brush Facts"; " Bristle 

57 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Brushes " ; " Our Brush Family of Family 
Brushes." 

Suppose it a dentifrice of some sort ; " Tooth 
Polish"; "A Tooth Saver"; "The Dentists' 
Foe ^; or a toilet water ; " The Odor Lasts " ; 
" Fragrant Waters." 

Make the headline a part of the first sentence 
of the ad if you like — in this way perhaps, 

" Mark a Black Mark 

if you're going to mark at all. Our lead 
pencil, etc." 

You can help along your ink sales by ads be- 
ginning ; " Inky Inks " ; " Who Reads Your 
Letters? Are you using an ink that they can 
see"? 

Here is an assorted jumble of headlines which 
you can apply as you like. 

" Are Slates Out of Style? " 

" Tag, You're It ! " ( ad vertise marking tags, 
shipping and tourists' tags). 

58 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

" We Study Blank Books/ 7 

" Leaky Inkstands" (are no longer useful, 
etc.). Put in a secondary display line in the 
middle of the ad — " From 5c Up." 

"Our Magazines Won't Explode." (all the 
late periodicals). 

" A Steamboat Deck " ( Steamboat playing 
cards). 

" We Whistle For Whist " (players to use our 
cards, etc.) 

" Pounds of Paper for Grains of Price." 

" The Late Books are Early" (in our stock). 

" The Rule of Thumb and Rule of Three " (are 
not in the same class with our 5c brass edge rule, 
etc. ) . 

"You Can File a Bill on a Rat Tail File" 
(but you might better get one of our — files, etc.). 

"Copperas for 5 Coppers" (per pound.) 

" Live Dyes for Live Dyers."' 

"Na 3 B 4 7 — Know Him?" (20c a pound, 
etc.). 

59 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

" Let's Hear You Cough " (yes you need our, 
etc.) 

" What the Doctor Orders " (is what you need 
— no substitution, etc.) 

"A Talcum Note." 

" Baby Bottles for Bottle Babies." 

" Good Wearing Soap." 

The habit will get you after practice and you 
will write good headings instinctively. 

If you are using the same ad in all your local 
papers, it's well to make the headings different 
in each. 

It is well to make the whole ad different, but* 
that is more than you will take the trouble to 
do, at first. 

Do not, of all things, be beguiled by the write- 
up man. Most country newspapers have a try 
at the write-up business. 

They want to publish your picture and tell a 
few things about your business and also (which 
is thrown in incidentally — a mere matter of 

60 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

form) ask for five dollars or fifty according to 
their nerve and your reputation. 

That write-up isn't worth ten cents of adver- 
tising value but some men are vain enough to 
pay the amount just to see themselves in 
print. 

A variation in the way of an ad is one calling 
attention to the fact that you have such and such 
goods as advertised in the current magazines. 
Name the magazine (say, the July Harpers 
Monthly or the July Munsey's) and then name 
the articles advertised which you sell. 

Better adopt some distinct typographical form 
at the outset for your newspaper ad. Here are 
a couple of new ones. In the first form split 
your single column space into two narrower 
columns, thus gaining the opportunity to ad- 
vertise two subjects — one in each little col- 
umn. 

A five or even four inch space used in this way 
should prove valuable. 

61 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 



Put the displayed lines well down and at dif- 
ferent heights. If one column is shorter than 
the other, let the blank space be at the top. 



Easter giving almost equals 
Christmas giving nowadays. 

We are prepared to supply 
you with the prettiest of appro- 
priate books. 

The new copyright novels are 
any of them pretty enough for 
gifts. 

We have some elegant little 
16 mos. in illuminated covers, 
25c each. 

Handsome illustrated books; 
books of travel; religious books. 

We sell the most popular of 

THE LATE NOVELS 

at about a third off from 
the publisher's price. 
Our window shows what's 



New Candy for the season. 
There's no better candy than 
's chocolates and bon- 



bons. 

Our stock is fresh from the 
factory. 

The packages are worthy the 
name of elegant. The goods 
are worthy of the packages. 
They are all 

MADE FOR EASTER 

Special Easter boxes of spe 
cial Easter goods. 

You have the chance to please 
someone immensely with one of 
these packages. 



Smith's Drug and Book Store. 

The other style of ad depends for its set off 
appearance upon the fact that the numerous 
lines do not reach to the sides of the column 
proper, leaving a nice margin all around. 

62 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

It Is a Wise Bug ! 

The wise bug avoids our insect 

powder. That's where he's wise. 

The wise bug wants to live. 

Our insect powder means a sudden 

and violent death. 

You really cannot blame the bug. 

We are not trying to work up 

sympathy for the bug. 

He must die sooner or later anyway, 

but our Persian insect powder kills 

him quicker than any other. 

If you want to send a million bugs 

to the H. H. G. (Happy Hunting Grounds) 

buy 50c worth of our bug powder for 

all sorts of bugs. 50c a pound ; 25c y 2 lb. 

SMITH'S DRUG STORE. 

If you do not have a catch phrase meaning 
" money back if you want it," you must mention 
very often that such is your position. Keep that 
idea prominent. It pays. 

Don't hesitate to spare your ad space the first 
of January every year to say Happy New Year 

63 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

to all your customers and to all the other fellows' 
customers. It's a profitable " jolly." 

Sign all your advertising the same way. Don't 
be " Smith's Drug Store " one week ; " Smith's 
Pharmacy " the next, and " Smith, the Pharma- 
cist " the third. 

Get a distinctive name in the first place and 
use it on all your ads of all kinds. Make that 
name descriptive if it's feasible. 

If you have the only brick drug store in town 
call it "Smith Brick Pharmacy." If it is stone, 
make it " The Stone Drug Store." 

If you have a big elm next to your store and 
elms are scarce in your town, be " The Elm Tree 
Stationer." All that sort of thing helps. 

Newspaper advertising is your main guy. 
Whatever other plans you adopt — don't neglect 
that. 



64 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 



III 

Circular Advertising 

NOWADAYS when a man begins to adver- 
tise he turns naturally to the newspaper 
first, but if he is successful, he will in a year or 
so, have that field fully covered and find that he 
has money left to spend in other ways. News- 
paper advertising, while the best for the retailer, 
is not the only profitable sort. 

By circular advertising I mean the use of 
folders or booklets of any and all kinds. That 
it does pay is beyond question — if it is good. 
Poor advertising of any sort will not pay. 

The requisites of a good and successful cir- 
cular ad are, that it shall reach the people to 
whom it appeals, that they shall read it, and 
that they shall be influenced by it. 

In order to reach them, you need first a good 

65 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

mailing list of every family within trading dis- 
tance of your store. Such a list can be made up 
with the aid of the poll lists and tax rolls. You 
should have that list so arranged that vou can 
reach any class of people on it without wasting 
circulars and postage on the others. 

If you are sending out a school book and 
school supply circular, there are lots of families 
to whom you do not want to mail. Circulars and 
postage, particularly the latter, are too expen- 
sive to waste. The postage item is a great draw- 
back, but it need not block the game. 

You can make a house to house distribution 
(by a clerk or small boy) of addressed circulars, 
which is about as satisfactory as any method, 
in the point of results. If you have a boy in the 
store, the expense is reduced to the cost of print- 
ing and envelopes. 

If your circular is largely for the interest of 
the lady of the house address it to her. A mailed 
circular sent to the man who has an office or 

66 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

store will seldom reach home. It gets into the 
waste basket about the first thing it does. You 
can't afford to send out waste basket advertising 
matter. 

Of course your aim is primarily to get up a 
circular that will be read wherever it lands. 
You can't do that though. 

The simplest form of circular is a plain four- 
page folder. No one can pull it from the en- 
velope without at least seeing what it is. You 
can have the paper folded into almost any shape 
you like, with flaps and creases galore, but don't 
have too many fancy folds, or it won't get un- 
folded. Avoid meaningless cuts, too, though ap- 
propriate ones are often an advantage. It is 
the talk you want noticed, not the pictures or 
the shape of the fold. 

Don't have your circulars set solid. A page 
of broken lines will be read when the one with- 
out a stopping place would not be looked at. It 
is possible to make the matter read in too jerky; 

67 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

a style, but better that than the long complicated 
sentences. 

A circular is more personal than it is possible 
for newspaper ads to be. You must exercise 
proportionate caution lest something be said in 
it which can offend some one of the recipients. 

You do not need the services of a professional 
ad writer whose fees come out of your profits. 
Write out your ad as you think it. Re-arrange 
it. Re-arrange it again. Then, if it doesn't suit 
you, tear it up and begin over. You will get the 
knack with practice, even if it isn't natural to 
you. 

Speaking of the professional ad writers; they 
are most of them people who have simply devel- 
oped a talent which you possess in a degree per- 
haps greater than theirs. 

You know your own stock better than anyone 
else does. The professional ad man probably 
lias no practical knowledge whatever of the 
workings of a drug or stationery store. 

68 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

There lies before me on my desk a sample cir- 
cular for prescription advertising, sent me by an 
" ad- wright." I forget who it was, but you could 
do better yourself. 

The outside indicated a prescription adver- 
tisement, but the inside was more uncertain. 
Inside are six pages set solid save for occasional 
cuts — some appropriate and some absolutely 
meaningless. 

The reading begins with " Purity in medicine," 
which is a good thing, and leaves the subject 
quickly to rush breathlessly on through the 
numberless others, — " Cinnamon," " Cinchona," 
" Quality," " Mechanical appliances of phar- 
macy," " Our success," " Invalid's needs," 
" Childhood," " Baby Foods " (full list of them), 
" Old Fashioned Recipes," " Bird, dog, and horse 
foods," " Blood and kidney remedies," " Throat 
and lung troubles," " Anti-fermentatives," 
" Emulsions," etc., etc., etc., and ends by saying 
that our stock is always good. 

69 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Not a price from beginning to end and not an 
idea that would stay in the mind of the person 
persistent enough to read the thing through. 

About the same rules should govern your cir- 
cular writing that govern your writing of news- 
paper ads. Don't try to say too much. People 
who talk too much rarely say anything worth 
remembering. 

Don't be stingy with your paper. Have the 
work done on the best you can get, and have it 
typographically correct. Above all things don't 
let your printer ornament it anywhere with rolls, 
scrolls or beautiful little birds hanging in impos- 
sible boughs. 

If you have to hire a country printer you will 
find it hard work to get him to eliminate all those 
things. You will have to insist. I did. Have 
nothing on the paper that does not belong there. 

Starting with a four-page folder use the first 
page for a simple heading. If it's to advertise 
tooth supplies, say, 

70 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

"If They're Right, Keep 'em Right/' 

Put that across the top and down in a corner 

sav something like this, — 

" WE MEAN 

YOUR TEETH." 

That's enough for the first page. Go at page 2 
like this;— 

" First A Brush. 

When the dentist has fixed your mouth up in 
good order, start in with a new brush. Get 
a good one. 

Get the best if you can, but anyway get 
one that will hold its bristles. 

Loose bristles in your mouth may cause 
serious trouble. 

We guarantee the bristles to stay in our 
25c brushes and in all the better ones. 

The cheaper grades you buy on your own 
responsibility. 

Remember that there are likely to be a 
few loose bristles in any new brush. 

Remember, too, that in the best brushes 
occasionally a bristle will break off." 

71 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Go on from this to discuss your various styles 
- four-row brushes, all bristle brushes, etc. 

Talk about powders and the like on page 3. 
You doubtless have a powder of your own. Put 
it in the front row and keep it there. When you 
sell your own preparations, you are advertising 
your store as well as your goods. You are selling 
goods that cannot be duplicated at the other 
druggists'. Here is some good talk for the tooth 
powder page. 

"Second A Powder. 

Taste goes far in dentifrices. 

No one likes a tooth powder with an un- 
pleasant taste. 

We make ours in several different flavors. 
You are sure to be suited. 

It is made in our store. We know what's 
in it. There's nothing to injure the teeth. 
No powerful acids or alkalies to destroy the 
enamel. 

Purity is the word and cleanliness the 
result. 

You like your teeth white. This will keep 

them so." 

72 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Avoid anything like, " Glean your teeth/' or 
" Will make your teeth white." Such are all 
right in a newspaper ad, but in a circular they 
squint too much toward presupposing a present 
condition of uncleanliness. There's a chance for 
lots of tact in advertising. Now the ad again : — 

" Gritty powders are not pleasant, neither 
are the soapy ones. We have struck the 
happy medium. 

Our formula is our own. Can't buy the 
same thing anywhere else. 

We keep all the standard powders adver- 
tised, but recommend and guarantee only 
our own. 

" Here's A Second Choice. 

If you like a liquid dentifrice best, try our 
velvet foam. 

It is fragrant for the breath and almost 
delicious to the taste. 

More important than all, it cleans and pre- 
serves the teeth, etc." 

On the last page of your little folder you do not 
want so much. Put the bulk inside. 

73 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Perhaps you have a tooth paste. The last page 
is a good place for that; just a short mention. 

Or you have a chance there to say that, " Our 
guarantee on brushes and powder means all and 
more than it says. 

It means that if you're not pleased you cab 
have your money back for the asking. You need 
bring nothing back. There is no red tape. Just 
walk in and say,— 'Mr. Smith, that tooth brush 
wasn't very satisfactory.' That's all. We'll do 
the rest. We are anxious to make such things 
right. 

You see, a dissatisfied customer may cost us 
many times the expense of refunding the amount 
of his purchase. 

We are under obligations when you give us a 
chance to refund. You are not the one accom- 
modated." 

Impress that idea upon people's minds. You 
can never afford to have them dissatisfied. 

Finish up your circular with your name or 
store name or whatever you sign your ads. 

74 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

If you build your circulars on this plan, they 
will be read. If you take the trouble to put a 
good half-tone of local scenery on one page, it 
will be preserved by most people for some time, 
and talked about. You will perhaps even have 
calls for extra copies, but there's no money in 
those, they will be sent away too far to help you. 

It is a good plan to get more folders than you 
need to reach the list you will use, because you 
can dispose of some in packages where they will 
do good by getting to people not on your list. 

The folder which I show further on, as a 
" Brush Talk » circular, cost me $14.00 for 600 
mailed (including the price of the half tone 
used on page 3). That was too much, but it paid. 

The postage is a big item. It costs a cent 
apiece every time. 

If you have made a folder that people will read 
it will do you good. How much good depends 
largely upon whether you have chosen wisely in 
the things you advertise and have quoted prices 

75 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

that are attractive. There are endless lines 
worthy of circulars but not all Avould pay for the 
expense. You can trace some of the good done 
by folders, directly, but remember that when a 
man gets your folder he may not be in need of 
what it talks about. 

It may be that he will not want a tooth brush 
in six months, and yet he might come to you after 
those months as a result of reading the folder. 
The effects of good circular advertising can only 
be gaged by the eventual increase in business 
in the departments advertised. 

Mail order business is the only business in 
which advertising can be satisfactorily " keyed." 

Circular advertising makes a good way to get 
at the other fellow's customers. Prices presented 
in this way do not always reach your competitor. 
Sometimes, though, he gets hold of a copy of 
your folder. 

Many druggists go in deeper than a mere 
folder. Some even issue annuals in which they 
sell advertising space. A six or eight page book- 

76 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

let can sometimes be made profitable, but if it is 
too thick it is not read. The mails are so full of 
circulars that to get read, one must be attractive 
and brief. 

The following specimen folder talks are all 
based on a four-page circular that will just slip 
into a 6^4 envelope. 

Here's a starter on a school book ad. It will 
pay you to send out one of these to the parents 
of every school child in your town. You can get 
such a list from the public school trustees. 

Page 1 
School Book Profits. 

(They're too large) 

Smith's ideas 

on 

the subject. 
Page 2 

Who Gets The Money ? 

Well, we get a fair profit — as small as we 
can get along with, and then lots of people 
think they're robbed. 

77 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

In a way they are. School books should 
be the cheapest books in the land. They are 
about the dearest. 

The publishers are the ones who make the 
prices and on the whole they are not so much 
to blame. Progression is so rapid that there 
must be new editions every year to bring the 
books up to the times. 

In some states the state buys the books. 

It will be so here in a few years, probably, 
but in the meanwhile where are you going to 
get your books? 

SCHOOL BEGINS NEXT WEEK. 

Our Way. 

We will take in exchange any second-hand 
school books you have that we can use. 

We allow about half price. The amount 
varies, according to the condition of the 
books. 

You can save money that way. We have 
second-hand books for sale now. 

They're just as good for the children, and 
much cheaper. 

78 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Of course we can't give you prices here. 
The list is too long, but we guarantee our 
prices to meet any competition. 
Page 3 
Other School Stuff. 

The books are the most important thing 
for the children, but they will need writing 
tablets, note books, slates, pencils, copy 
books and all sorts of odds and ends. 

The children usually buy all those things 
for themselves. We know that. 

We know, too, that the children are our 
most particular customers, and our best 
when they are pleased. 

They know every time whether they are 
treated right or not. 

Send them to us for the school stuff and 
we will do our best for them. 

Our pads are the best going and the big- 
gest at the price — from one cent up. 

Our penny pencils are the sort we used to 

sell for three cents. We don't buy them in 

car-load lots, but we do buy big enough to 

buy cheap. 

79 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

To Carry the Books 

and keep them clean, get the girl a book bag 
and the boy a strap. It will be money well 
invested. They're 5c and 10c. 

Patent carriers that are easy to use, 10c. 
Lunch boxes ; the sort that fold up, 10c, too. 
Page 4 
We Take The Chances. 

If you get a book that's wrong, bring it 
back. If you get anything else that's wrong, 
bring it back. 

Sometimes when you start the boy for 
school you want to get his books ready be- 
fore-hand but are afraid you'll get the wrong 
books. Isn't that so? 

We take the chances. Come and get your 
books, and if they are not right, we'll buy 
them back. 

SMITH'S DRUG STORE 
(Book Store, Too) 
That folder copy or any of the others, you can 
use as near verbatim as you like, or you can 
easily make additions or subtractions. 

80 



FOE DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 
Here's one about prescriptions and the like : 
Page 1 
We Offer You Our Brains. 

Our Care is 
Your Protection. 
Page 2 

It Is Your Right 

to demand that the pharmacist who com- 
pounds your prescriptions use every possible 
care to get them right. 

Not only must he try his best to get them 
right but he must do it. 
Let the physician make mistakes in the writ- 
ing of a prescription — it is the pharmacist's 
duty to correct those as well as to keep his 
own work free from error. 
No men, professional or otherwise, have a 
greater responsibility placed upon them 
than do druggists. 

Their working hours are long but they must 
be absolutely accurate. A moment's ab- 
sence of mind might cause a loss of life. 
81 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

We only mention this to show that we ap- 
preciate the necessity for constant vigilance 
and alertness. 

We are not objecting to our hours though we 
would like them shorter. 
We use every precaution to guard against 
error. Our prescriptions are all put up by 
registered pharmacists, and the items are 
always checked by a second man as a safe- 
guard. 

Page 3 
How We Check Them. 

Before compounding a prescription the in- 
gredients in their containers are assembled 
upon one side of the prescription desk. As 
the articles are weighed or measured out the 
containers are moved to the opposite end of 
the desk and the items on the prescription 
itself are checked thus — V 
When the work is completed, a second clerk 
moves the containers back, one at a time 
making a second check on the written pre- 
scription like this — V V 
82 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

This system makes an error a practical im- 
possibility. 

We know that the drugs in all our containers 
are right for everything is identified when it 
comes into the store. 

One cannot have too many safeguards where 
there is danger, and we take pleasure in ex- 
plaining our system. 

We are prepared to fill all prescriptions 
promptly, and at prices which are governed 
by the cost — not the size — of the finished 
product. 

If you have a formula that you have had dif- 
ficulty in getting filled, bring it to us. 
If we do not have the necessary ingredients 
(and we probably will have) we will get 
them for you and there will be no extra 
charge for the special order. Not much de- 
lay either. 

Page 4 

When You Are Sick 

or when some of the family are, don't forget 
83 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

this little talk. Our care might mean a 

great deal to you. 

Our brains and our experience are at your 

service. 

Smith's Drug Store 



You can buy from the news company a little 
booklet which is issued every month with the 
titles, prices, etc., of the books published during 
the previous thirty days. 

A better and more profitable plan is to send 
out a folder of your own, perhaps a single slip, 
printed on only one side, would do. 

The expense is small — you wouldn't need a 
large quantity. 

Write them up with the names of the best sell- 
ing books, publisher's price and your own, au- 
thor, and a line or two of favorable comment 
from some newspaper or magazine review. In 
most cases you will find the book advertised in 
some of the Saturday or Sunday papers with just 
the mention quoted that you need. 

Make your leaflet like this, — 

84 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

"The New Books Worth While. 

We hope to warn you every month of what 
is new T and popular in literature. 
Our book stock is improving every day. If 
, you want what's new while it is new, come 
to us. 
If we haven't it, we'll get it. 



Uncle Tom's Cabin. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe. 500 pages, handsome cloth. Baker, 
Pratt & Co. Publisher's price $1.50. Our 
price $1.10. Mailing price $1.24. " The 
American Novel at Last." — (N. Y. Tribune.) 

There aren't a lot of books that need such men- 
tion every month. 

In the fall, or just before Christmas, say De- 
cember 1, make your leaflet a folder and go into 
details on the holiday books. 

Perhaps you can even get a half tone from the 
publisher to illustrate the folder. 

Even if you do have to sell the copyright books 
at a narrow margin, they are good sellers, and 

85 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

when people once get in the habit of coming to 
you for them, they will get in the habit of finding 
in your store other things and other books that 
you will sell them. 

Get the people coming and keep them coming ; 
that's the secret of a successful store. 

If you are going to introduce a new line, do it 
in a new way. 

When W. R. Hearst started the " Chicago 
American " he sent around the city to the private 
residences a card and a penny. 

The card said " Will you use this penny to buy 
a copy of the Chicago American to-morrow morn- 
ing? " 

Probably some pennies never bought a paper, 
but I venture to say that 95 per cent of them did. 
Can you use that idea? 

Are you going to start a new fountain? Why 
not send a five cent piece to each of a carefully 
chosen list of your own and the other fellow's 
lady customers, with the request that that nickel 

86 



FOE DEUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

be used to purchase a glass of soda water from 
your new fountain? 

Use bran new nickels and see that your list is 
so made out that none will be offended at not 
receiving an invitation and that as few nickels 
as possible w r ill reach places where they will 
not be used. 

The best plan for such a distribution is to send 
your boy with the addressed envelopes direct to 
the houses. Address the envelopes to the lady 
of the house most likely to respond to the request. 

If you use new nickels you can easily keep 
track of how many come back. 

Such things make people talk about you. Get 
ahead faster than they expect you to. There's 
money in arriving ahead of time. 

Do you remember the story of the West Vir- 
ginia railroad? 

A train which had been halting at every cross- 
roads at last stopped where there was not even 
a path visible and an irate passenger shouted at 
the conductor, 

87 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

"Well, what's the matter now?" 

The conductor replied, 

" There's a drove of cows on the track, sir." 

The train went on after a little, but only to 
stop again shortly. 

The passenger kicked again, " What's the 
cause of this stop, conductor?" 

" Oh/' said the official, " We've caught up to 
those cows again." 

" Well," said the passenger, " How long is this 
going to last? What kind of a road is this any- 
way — a cowpath?" 

" If you don't like this train," responded the 
conductor with asperity, " you can get off and 
walk." 

" No, I can't do that. My friends aren't ex- 
pecting me until the train arrives," said the 
passenger. 

Don't be afraid of bringing your store to the 
front sooner than it's expected. It will make 
people talk and that's what you want. 

88 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

If people talk about your store, if it becomes 
noted — not notorious — you will do business 
right along. 

Avoid anything sensational. Sensational ad- 
vertising is likely to prove a boomerang. 

Some druggists are their own printers — have 
small printing presses in their stores. There's 
no money in that if you do good work and there's 
less if you do poor work. 

In the former case you lose because your work 
costs too much and in the latter you lose because 
poor work does you harm wherever it goes. 

Some retail advertisers use a duplicator. That 
doesn't do very nice work either. Good work by 
a good print shop is the best and the best is none 
too good for your business. A makeshift may an- 
swer but it will never bring satisfactory results. 

There is a little booklet advertising " Cedar- 
ine" furniture polish. That booklet has given 
" Cedarine " Allen a national reputation by rea- 
son of its cleverness as an advertisement. 

89 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Go to your furniture dealer, if you have not 
seen the book already, and ask him for one. You 
can learn something from it. 

The thing that will strike you most forcibly 
will be its terseness. 

Repetition and looseness of rhetorical con- 
struction are the foes of that brevity so essential 
to successful ad writing. 

A folder on the subject of ream goods will help 
the stationery business. 

It will bring you some good trade from the 
other stores by interesting in that way of buying 
stationery, people who have not had their at- 
tention called to it by their own dealer. 

It may make some of your box customers buy 
ream goods but that won't hurt you any. 



Page 1 



The Ream Scheme 
Stops Waste. 
Smith tells you how 
to buy ream goods. 
90 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Page 2 
What Ream Goods Are. 

By " ream goods " we mean note papers put 
up in quarter ream packages and envelopes 
to match put up separately in one-eighth 
thousand boxes. 

No, we don't want you to buy all that 
amount at once. We rarely sell full 
packages. 

We will sell the paper one sheet or a thou- 
sand at a time ; the envelopes one or a thou- 
sand at a time. 

In other words, buying ream goods means 
buying your writing paper and envelopes in 
any proportion you see fit and in any 
quantity. 

Their Advantage. 

The price advantage comes first, of course. 
The same amount of paper costs a little less 
— not so very much, but a little. It's the 
waste that you save. 

Most letter writers don't come out even — 
91 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

some paper left or some envelopes — usually 
the latter. 

If you use ream goods, you can get more of 
either to match, or better yet buy in the 
right proportion in the first place. 

50 — 84—44 

That's our right proportion combination. 
50 envelopes and 84 sheets of paper — Hurl- 
but' s Alexandria wove in the latest shape. 
The 44? That's the price. The combina- 
tion has proved a big success. 
You don't need to read this through twice to 
see that the ream scheme prevents waste. 
Waste not, want not. 

Will you read a little further and get the 
prices? 

Page 3 
We Begin With the Smallest. 

We know the smallest size as Baronial 5. 
You perhaps call it " invitation paper." 
It is white or cream. 10c a quire, envelopes 
10c a package. Either, 40c a box. 
92 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Next size, Billet, not much bigger than 
Baronial 5. No bigger in price. Same price 
exactly. The old octavo comes next. We sell 
mostly the square paper with long envelopes 
now, but it's a matter of taste. The octavo 
is 13c a quire — unlucky price, but the paper 
is all right — 50c for five quire box. 
The commercial is used more especially for 
business purposes ; 15c a quire ; 60c a box. 

The Popular Gladstone 

and Winthrop sizes are the ones that sell. 
In those two shapes we have the best Irish 
linen going (good on St. Patrick's day or 
any other day). 

It is a linen paper to be proud of — real linen, 
every fibre of it. 

15c a quire, envelopes 15c a package. 
We have, too, paper of two weights in a 
calendered white or cream. The lighter, 
which is most used, is 15c a quire, three 
quires for 40c; and the heavier (very heavy) 
20c, two quires for 35c. 

Hurlbut's foreign mail is the right thing for 
93 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

foreign correspondence or for long letters; 
15c a quire, 65c a box. Envelopes to match 
at prices to match. 

Most of these grades we have in ruled and 
plain. The plain is the most attractive and 
most used. Lines spoil the appearance of 
nice paper. 

Page 4 

Here's the Paper Table. 

24 sheets make one quire, 
20 quires " " ream, 

2 reams " " bundle, 

5 bundles " " bale. 
We use the table only up as high as reams. 

Stone's Stationery Store. 
(If it's paper we have it) 

Here's a circular I sent out in March with good 
results. Notice that there is on the last page a 
two line reference to witch hazel at 25c a bottle — 
different from the " Violet Witch Hazel." That 
two-line reference made a lot of sales of Witch 

94 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Hazel for me which shows that the circular was 
read in detail by most people. 

Page 1 

Smith's 
"Makes You Well" 
Guarantee. 

These three, 

Sarsaparilla, 
Beef, Iron and Wine, 
Lithia Tablets, 
And One Other, 

Violet Witch Hazel. 

Page 2 
The Guarantee First. 

Before the cure, the guarantee. If any of 
the preparations named herein do not prove 
satisfactory; if you think they have donel 
you no good — come and get your money 
back. It is waiting for you. 
We can't guarantee the other fellow's medi- 
cines in this way — Hood's or Ayer's Sarsa- 
parilla, etc. 

95 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Ours are as good as theirs and we think, 
better. Our price is much lower. 

The Sarsaparilla. 

We back it to knock out that old tired feeling 
in short order. It is a spring medicine that 
w T ill make you well. 

Is your appetite gone? Do you have 
rheumatism in a mild way? Are you 
bilious? 

Our sarsaparilla is expressly compounded 
for correcting such difficulties and straight- 
ening out a system made sluggish by bad 
blood. 

The faulty conditions arising from what is 
nothing more or less than impurity in the 
blood are almost countless. 
We warrant our sarsaparilla to make you 
well — to cleanse the blood and start you 
anew. 

It is 60c per bottle, six bottles for $3.00. 
We have all the other standard sarsaparillas 
at a dollar a bottle. 
96 



FOB DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 
Page3 
Beef, Iron and Wine. 

Good beef, iron and wine needs no bush. 
Everyone knows this old reliable medicine. 
It contains nutriment, strength and stimu- 
lant combined. 

All of the ingredients are of the best and 
purest. Good for lack of blood. Good for 
prompt relief in cases of sudden exhaustion. 
Nothing better for convalescents. Try it 
when getting over the grip. 
Each bottle (a pint) 50c. 

Lithia Tablets. 

Lithia tablets are used principally for all 
troubles arising from kidney difficulties. 
They are first-class for rheumatism from 
that source. 

Few people have the gout, but lithia will 
cure it. 

Good as a preventive of Bright's disease. 
Our lithia is put in screw cap vials of 50 
five grain effervescent tablets. Each tablet 
97 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

makes a glass of lithia water of greater and 
more uniform strength than the natural 
spring water. 25c per bottle. 

Page 4 
Violet Witch Hazel. 

That's an agreeable name! 

It's an agreeable preparation. 

It is new T , but it is going to be a winner. 

All the advantages of witch hazel and none 

of its odor. 

All the advantages of a good toilet water 

with the healing effect besides. 

You want it if you shave; you w r ant it if you 

don't. 

It's good for the bath, it's good for the toilet : 

it's forty cents a bottle with a sprinkle top. 

Common Witch Hazel (best made) 25c for a 

pint bottle. 

Smith's Drug Store. 
(Money back if you want it) 

The next is a note paper ad sent out a little 
before Christmas. It sold us out on holidav 

V 

boxes. 

98 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Page 1 was really a blank, but page 3, that is 
the second leaf was enough longer than the first 
to fold back over it making the title, which was 
really on the 4th page appear in front. 

The whole was folded endwise and was printed 
the long way of the paper. 

Page 1 

Sense for the Sensible. 

Page 2 

It's Writing Paper Sense. 

Everybody who writes uses writing paper. 

That may be trite but it's true. 

We use some ourselves and think we know 

what's what. 

This is what: our writing paper stock is 

pretty close to perfection. 

That's no secret; you may tell it to anyone. 

We have all the newest styles and all the 

old standard shapes and shades. 

In ream goods (meaning papers which we 

sell by the quire) we have, of course, both 

LcfC. " 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

cream and white, satin finish paper in all 
sizes, from Baronial 5 (the invitation size) 
to Gladstone, the large square paper which 
calls for long envelopes. 
We have too, a real Irish linen and a par- 
ticularly fine, light w r eight, foreign mail. 
Envelopes to match all these we sell by the 
package. 

Prices? Well, it is difficult to make the 
prices plain, so we will only say that they 
are from ten to fifteen cents per quire for 
paper and the same price per package for 
envelopes. 

These, you know, are not cheap papers, but 
the best goods made in the Berkshire hills. 
We buy from the factory. 

Page 3 
In Boxes. 

The quality is there; it is not all box — of 
course we have cheap boxes — ten cents and 
thirteen cents. 

The box papers afford an unlimited variety 
for choice. 

100 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

All the tints of the rainbow and some that 
never saw a rainbow. 

Fawn is a new and popular one — 25c a box. 
Azure, pansy, helio-violet, Dresden blue ; we 
can't tell them all here. The Rookwood, 
mottle-tinted sea green is the newest thing. 
A good box is our " Delhi." The paper is 
stamped (not printed) " Delhi, N. Y." It is 
a 25c box. We keep a line of initial papers 
too and can give you a good paper with your 
initial in gold on each sheet. 
But the apple of our eye is our pound pack- 
age. It is not an effort to see how much 
cheap paper we can crowd into a small 
priced package. It is a pound in actual 
weight of Alexandria white wove Glad- 
stone size paper which w-e sell for thirty 
cents. 

The envelopes to match are ten cents a pack- 
age of twenty-five. 

One pound of paper and fifty envelopes — 
forty-four cents. 
If you buy the combination once, you will 

buy it again. 

101 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Page 4 
For Christmas. 

We have a special holiday lot of handsome 

papeteries in fancy boxes. 

The paper is of the best and the package is 

in every case worthy of its contents. 

The prices are from 35c to $1.25. Have you 

ever tried stationery for a Christmas 

present? 

Smith's Stationery Store. 

Lots of druggists and stationers sell cameras 
and camera supplies. 

Here is the text for a camera ad. I used it at 
Christinas time. A little change in the wording 
would make it suitable for any season. 

Page 1 

About Cameras For Christmas. 

You 

CAN 

READ 

IT 

IN 

A 

MINUTE. 

102 



FOE DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Page 2 
Reasons Why They're All Right. 

Everybody who has no camera, wants one. 
Everybody who has one wants a better one. 
They are good fun for a long time and a 
short price. 

Just a Word In General. 

When you buy be sure of the lens. That is 

the vital point. 

The box is of secondary importance. We 

know good lenses and we guarantee every 

one we sell to be perfect. 

If you are a beginner, get the camera that's 

simplest. 

Anyone can make pictures if the camera is 

not overloaded with " handy contrivances." 

Page 3 
In Particular. 

We have a special Christmas camera. It is 
The Wizard. Every one is worth $15.00. 
We sell them for $9.75. They are made out- 
side of the trust, if that is any inducement. 
103 



DETAIL ADVERTISING 

We know that we buy them cheaper on that 

account. 

This 4x5 Wizard is well finished in black 

leather with nickel trimmings, a fine double 

lens and pneumatic release. 

We give free with each one a handy leather 

carrying case and strap and a manual of 

instructions. 

Besides The Wizard 

we sell the Vives. 

They will carry more plates than some kinds 
will and they work with a lever. No plate- 
holder to take out and reverse. 
Prices on these are from $5.85 to $7.50. 

Page 4 

One or Two Second-hand Cameras. 

We always have a few of the second-hand in 
stock. Just now one of our best bargains is 
a $7.00 Bulls Eye for $3.50. 

Smith's Drug Store. 

A good cold weather circular is the following, 

104 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Page 1 

Some Rough Weather Stuff. 
Smith's Drug Store. 

Page 2 
Comfort Talk. 

The late fall months add many discomforts 
to life. We can relieve you of some of them 
if you'll let us. We have all of the best 
cold weather medicines. 
If we brag a little here, remember that we 
are talking about our own preparations. 
They are made from our formulas. We 
know what's in them. 

There is reason for us to brag. It is justifi- 
able. 

White Pine and Tar. 

There is a cough cure that will cure a cough 

or you get your money back. 

Nothing harmful in it. It is pleasant to 

take; the children like it (but don't cry for 

it). 

105 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

We have sold it for five winters. Last win- 
ter twice as much as the previous one. 
It is cheap enough — 20c a bottle, two bottles 
for 35c, same as would cost 50c of the ordi- 
nary sorts. 

Cold Cream. 

Pure, clean and fragrant with the odor of 
the best imported rose water. 
Nothing better than this for chapped lips 
and rough weather complexions. It nour- 
ishes the skin. 

Apply it at night, and in the morning sun- 
burn and wind-burn have disappeared. 
It is as good as the highest priced cream in 
the market. 

Put up in porcelain jars with nickel screw 
caps — 15c each. 

Page 3 
Velvet Cream. 

It isn't sticky. 

You can use it on your hands and draw on 
your gloves almost immediately after. 
10G 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

It is a liquid and is more easily absorbed 
by the skin than the cold cream. Good for 
all chafed surfaces, 22c per bottle. 

Quinine Pills. 

Heard of them before, have you? 

Well we won't bore you long. 

Two grain pills 5c a dozen. What have 

you been paying? These are the best pills 

that money can buy or that skill can make. 

35c a hundred. 

Tired of These 

Rough weather reminders? Here's a warm 
weather article, just for luck. 

Thelma Perfume! 

The latest and best of all perfumes. Its 
odor is distinctive. It will last too. 
That is the real test of a good perfume. If 
it doesn't last, it's no good. Thelma lasts. 
We sell it only in bulk, 50c an ounce. Bring 
in your bottle. No one else sells it. It is 
our special odor. 

107 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Page l 

u Doift shoot," says Si, " it ain't no use, 
It's Deacon Peleg's lame wild goose." 
Says Ezra, kk I donM care a cent, 
Fve sighted and I'll let her went." 

Have yon sighted some other drug store for 
your kk rough weather Stuff," or do our arguments 
appeal to you? 

[f you are " agin' " us after reading this little 
folder we will be sorry, but not discouraged. 

One Last Word. 

Don't forget that we give you your money 
back if you waul it. 

We say we'll do it and we will. We want no 
dissatisfied customers. Smith's Drug Store. 

In this brush circular I used a half-tone to 
occupy the entire third page. 

Page l 
Brush Talk. 

Smith's Drug Store. 
108 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Page 2 
About Hair Brushes. 

If hair brushes could talk they would first 
of all say, " Keep us dry." 
If you cannot keep your hair brushes dry, 
keep them as dry as you can. 
They will last twice as long dry as they will 
wet. Probably the easiest brush to keep dry 
and clean is one with a solid wood back, or 
an aluminum combination back. 
Ordinarily speaking, the more you pay for 
your brush the better it will be. And what is 
more important, the cheaper it will be too. 
Quality advances more rapidly than price. 

About Prices. 

The best way to get prices is to see the 
brushes and ask how r much they are. We 
cannot describe them well enough here. 
We have a solid back, ebony finish brush for 
30c. It is a cheap brush, but it's the best 
we ever had for that price. 
25c is our cheapest brush. Then the prices 
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RETAIL ADVERTISING 

go 30c, 35c, 38c, 45c, 50c, 55c, etc., up to 

$1.50. 

The military brushes are $1.25 to $2.00 a 

pair. First class quality with ebony or light 

colored backs. 

Aluminum back brushes — 50c and upward. 

Page 4 
Tooth Brush Facts. 

Tooth brushes are meant to be wet. You 
cannot wet them too wet or too often. 
Water will not affect their backs or make 
the bristles come out. 

Use icill bring the bristles out if they are 
not well put in. 

Do not think that all the bristles which 
come from your tooth brush pull out. Some 
break off. In a good brush they should do 
neither. 

If you buy a cheap brush you may be cer- 
tain that the bristles will come out, A cheap 
tooth brush is no economy. 
By cheap we mean less than 25c. Bristles 
that come out and get into your throat may 
cause serious trouble. 

110 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

We Make More Money 

On cheap brushes than we do on good ones. 

We prefer to sell good ones though. We 

want satisfied customers. 

Our 25c brush is a four-row, all French 

bristle brush. We guarantee the bristles not 

to come out. 

We have better brushes — better and cheaper 

because they last longer — ever so much 

longer. They are 30c, 35c, 40c, 45c and 50c. 

For 10c we sell the best brush ever sold in 

town at that price. 

A blank book circular must be straight to the 
point. The people it's for are business people 
and they will not take time to read poor ads. 

Here's a practical blank book talk. 

Page 1 
A Business Man's Time 

Is Worth Money. 

This is a little 

blank book talk 

by Smith the druggist. 

Ill 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Page 2 
You Use Them. 

If you do a cent's worth of credit business 
you use blank books. If you never trust any- 
body you use them. 

If you do a credit business (everyone does 
too much, even a cash store does) you need 
all kinds of blank books. 
We buy direct from the manufacturer, that 
is a new step on our part — one middle-man's 
profit gone. 

Better books for less money than heretofore. 
When you want a book you know just what 
you want. The nearest thing to it may not 
be near enough. 

We are more likely to have the book than 
any other dealer in the country. 
We can get for you any special ruling that 
you need, at a reasonable price, and get it 
promptly. 

It is nearly January first when lots of the 
old account books will be laid aside. 
That means, buy new ones — we hope you 
will buy them of us. 

112 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Page 3 
Standard Books, 

like journals, ledgers, day books, everyone 

uses. Some people have more cash books 

than they have cash, but it's better to have 

too many books than not enough. 

We keep the standard books up to 600 pages, 

no larger. 

If you want a thicker book we can get it 

for you quick. 

Of course the thicker the book, the thicker 

the price. 

600 page books in half Russia— $2.75. 

500 page, duck with Russia corners, $1.25. 

We have a line too, with extra large pages — 

lots of room to write out descriptions of 

items, etc., 300 pages, $1.50. 

We can show you some crack-a-jacks in 25c 

order books and long days with linen or 

board covers. 

The thin books, 100 pages and the like, we 

keep too but cannot quote prices on all of 

them here. 

113 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Our pocket account books, from vest-pocket 
memorandums up to pocket ledgers are from 
5c to 75c. We sell more at 5c than we do 
at 75c. 
We guarantee every book that we sell. 

Page 4 

To Smithville's Business Men. 

We wish you all a happy and prosperous 
New Year. 

It is our hope that the coming year may be a 
year of success in which every Smithville 
merchant may share. 

Smith's Drug Store. 

MONEY BACK IF YOU WANT IT. 

One great fault, even with professional ad 
writers, is their poor grammar. They say, "Oh, 
never mind occasional grammatical errors. It's 
business sense we're after." There's truth in 
that, but it's in the latter part of the quotation. 
It is business sense we're after, but it costs no 
more to have a grammatically correct circular 

114 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

printed than one which violates every rule in the 
rhetoric. 

You are going to write ads — write them right. 
Don't run the chance of having the reader's at- 
tention diverted from the " business sense " by 
grammatical errors which may quite controvert 
the sense. 

An 85-page book lies before me — sent out by a 
firm of live young New York city druggists. It 
just misses being extremely good. 

It lacks clearness and brevity on lots of its 
pages. For instance — not a very bad instance 
either — it reads, about bay rum — " Everybody 
knows what it's for — bathing and gentlemen 
after shaving." 

Make your circular clear. People will not 
trouble to read such things through twice to get 
at the sense. 



115 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 



IV 

Window Displays 

BY no other outward appearance is a store 
so quickly judged as by its windows. It 
should be so. The man who will not keep up 
outward appearances, what regard will he have 
for internal tidiness? 

Better, far better, have windows clean and 
empty than dirty and filled with a jumbled as- 
sortment of goods. 

When you begin to use your windows, don't 
think that as soon as you fill them with some- 
thing, people are going to immediately rush in 
and buy that thing. You may fill a window with 
letter files, leave them a week and not sell a one, 
but the next time a man who has noticed that 
window, needs a file there's a big chance of his 
coming to you for it. 

110 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

It's like all other kinds of advertising. You've 
got to keep everlastingly at it. The results al- 
ways come slowly at first. 

The first step on windows, if you have been 
slack about yours, is to stop them from being a 
discredit, next make them a credit. 

Cleanliness is the first essential of course. 
Don't wait until you get a plate glass front, be- 
gin now on what you have. 

Any window that is big enough to let in light is 
big enough to let in trade. 

My own store windows are not plate glass. 
There are nine panes in each window and I've 
been somewhat discouraged with them at times, 
but I've kept them as clean as I could and kept 
them talking with window signs and good goods 
and they have made money for me. 

To be successful as advertisers your windows 
must be changed often. If you live in a small 
town, once a week will serve very well. 

Anything that you put into the window will 
117 



EETAIL ADVERTISING 

be injured by the light more or less and some 
goods will be spoiled quickly — perfumes and 
delicate tinted box papers. 

On this account it is wise, from mere motives 
of economy, to change windows often. 

I know that this general advice about windows 
has all been said time and time again. But in 
spite of that some people have let their windows 
stand idle and worse for days and weeks. 

You wouldn't think of paying for good news- 
paper space and then leaving it blank. Your 
windows are worth more than that space in the 
paper. 

The most valuable things a druggist can have 
in his window (and few seem to know it) are 
good colored show bottles well lit at night. They 
needn't be of the newest style. Don't set yours 
away because they are of an old design and you 
can't afford new ones. The older ones are some- 
times like the old sign — indicative of stability 
and permanence. They show that you have been 

118 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

in business for a while. Keep the colors bright 
though. 

Almost hundreds of times I have gone into 
strange villages at night and seeking a drug 
store have looked for the colored globes. You 
have done the same thing yourself. Does that 
fact mean anything to you? 

The public recognize them as the sign of the 
pharmacy. I have seen men stand in front of 
a drug store without show bottles and wonder 
where the drug store was, and seeing a colored 
light farther on, make a bee line for it. 

The public are quick to catch the significance 
of such things. 

A man came into my store one day and said, 

" I was just into Smith's drug store looking 
for school books. He didn't have none 't I 
wanted and told me there wasn't any other store 
near here that kep' 'em, but as I come out I seen 
your sponges out in front an' I ' sez ' to myself, 
where there's sponges there's school books an' 
here I be." 

119 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

That man drew an illogical conclusion, but it 
proved to be right. Keep something in sight to 
show what sort of a store you're running, even if 
it's nothing more than a sponge case or show 
bottles. 

There are plenty of people who will not see 
your sign, be it ever so plain. That doesn't mean 
that you don't need a sign. You have seen people 
lift goods from under a " 10c each " card and ask 
" How much are these? " 

If your store is drugs and stationery you prob- 
ably use one window habitually for drug and 
one for stationery displays. You only need show 
bottles in one window anyway and if it's a possi- 
ble thing have lights behind them in the position 
where the color will show farthest up and down 
the street. 

It is worth while for a country merchant to 
visit one of the large cities twice a year if only 
to get window ideas and to get the conviction 
forced upon him that it is showing goods with 
prices attached that sells the goods. 

120 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

If windows will pay in any business they will 
pay in drugs and stationery. Why, even news- 
papers nowadays use their windows. Look at 
the New York Herald building and its valuable 
two-story window space given up to nothing but 
an exhibition of newspaper printing from year's 
end to year's end. 

Your new customers, the ones you are striving 
for by newspaper and circular advertising — 
their impressions of you have hitherto been 
formed by your windows. If they have not 
known you at all, they will form their first ideas 
of your store when they find it. First impres- 
sions are the most lasting — what impression will 
they form? 

A new family comes to your village. They 
have money. They will use perhaps two hun- 
dred and fifty dollars w T orth of your kind of 
stuff the first year. They are looking for a 
place to buy their drugs and stationery. They 
came from a town where their druggist had a 
style to his store. 

121 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Are they going to pick out your store for their 
drug store from among the available ones? Are 
they? Well, compare the external appearance of 
your windows and their dressings to those of the 
other fellows. New people will get into the best 
looking drug store first if the village is small. 
The chances favor it. If one store looks better 
outside than the rest, they will try it sooner or 
later anyway, and that store will probably keep 
the family trade if the inside service is good. 

Take pains. Windows require pains (no joke 
intended) more than almost anything else about 
your store. That doesn't excuse shiftlessness in 
the back of the store either. 

Don't be ridiculous and stand upon your dig- 
nity until it rots from under you. " I am a 
graduate pharmacist — a professional man. If 
people wish my services they will seek me out 
without need of my adopting the brass band 
methods of the department store." 

Yes, you are a professional man, but you are 

122 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

a merchant too. If you are a stationer only, you 
won't be troubled by any of those overgrown 
ideas of dignity and will make barrels of money 
while your dignified brother of the drug store 
is wearing his " last summer's suit " into the 
third season. 

Keep the glass of your windows free from 
signs — enamel letters ajid so on. The eye catches 
on them and misses the contents of the window. 

Don't be afraid of painting the woodwork too 
often. Paint is cheap. 

When the theatrical bill poster wants your 
windows, just say him nay. You can better 
afford to use the window space yourself and pay 
for tickets to the play than to sell your windows 
for " conips." 

One thing that has proven a boon to window 
dressers within the last few years, is crepe paper. 
Its present cheapness makes it possible for 
anyone to arrange a pretty window at a small 
expense. Crepe tissue or cheese cloth can be 

123 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

bought in almost any color and can be used a 
great many times. These draperies are within 
reach of everybody's pocketbook (or money 
drawer. ) 

Aside from such dressing, all you need for sim- 
ple window displays is to draw on your supply of 
empty boxes. A little experience will teach you 
what shapes you are likely to use oftenest and 
you will soon have the boards and boxes saved to 
arrange almost any kind of a window. 

You doubtless have something of an eye for 
colors. If you haven't someone in the store has. 

See that your color schemes are good. 

It is a good idea to make some one color pre- 
dominant in each display — same as you ought 
to make some one class of goods the prevailing 
idea of the display. 

Too much variety at once confuses the mind 
of the passer by and leaves no distinct 
impression. 

In dressing your windows, arrange them so 

124 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

that the light will all come from the front and 
top. Light from behind the goods spoils the 
effect. 

The main object in a window exhibition is to 
impress even the casual passer that you keep 
a certain article for sale at such a price. That 
should be evident without its being necessary 
for the observer to stop. 

For the people who will stop you can prepare 
all sorts of information on small cards. There 
are plenty of cheap printing outfits to be had for 
marking window signs. They answer pretty well 
too, but the best outfit is a good brush and a pot 
of black marking ink. 

You will not make good signs at first, but keep 
at it. Make them plain. That's better than mak- 
ing them fancy. Don't put in a single flourish or 
unnecessary mark. 

Always put the price on the window display in 
figures large enough to be seen from the curb or 
farther, 

125 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

as in writing the newspaper ads you will gain 
in writing window cards. Try for originality in 
your windows. You needn't make them menag- 
eries to be that. Something alive in the window 
is always a big attraction. It will move, motion 
catches the eye, if it's only a swinging pendulum. 

Some druggists keep a clock on the end wall of 
their window. That's a good idea if you keep the 
clock right so that people will fall into the habit 
of looking at it for the correct time. 

I know a druggist who has a clock in the 
window and it sometimes stands for weeks with- 
out a swing of its pendulum. People soon get on 
— that clock is a damage. 

I couldn't name all the wild animals that have 
been used in window displays. You can buy baby 
alligators for a song. You can use mice with a 
wheel for them to run on. Birds aren't so 
good. An aquarium is a short lived attraction 
with no money in it unless you sell goldfish which 
many druggists do to advantage. 

126 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

The animal displays are too apt to be noth- 
ing more than animal displays. Don't forget 
that window displays are to sell goods, not 
merely to keep a crowd of men and small boys 
around the front of your store looking in your 
window or looking out. 

Mechanical figures and displays which are ar- 
ranged to utilize a small motor are valuable. 
Little electric motors can be bought for a dollar 
and with the aid of some ingenuity can be made 
to produce action in your window. Larger mo- 
tors answer better and a w T ater motor is best. 
The latter can be put in operation without much 
trouble if your w r ater pipe is where it can be 
tapped near to the window. 

Running water itself is a good thing in the 
window. It is a good thirst developer for a soda 
fountain window. 

Most of the trade journal advice on window 
decorating is based on better windows and larger 
stocks of goods than many druggists carry. The 

127 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

ideas are valuable though. Read everything that 
comes in sight about advertising and window dis- 
plays. You will catch an idea sometimes when 
you least expect it. Ideas are worth money — 
never let one slip. 

When an idea for a good window display 
strikes you and you cannot use it at the time, 
write it down. 

A splendid plan is to have a scrap book for 
all sorts of odds and ends of information about 
advertising and window displays. Sample ads 
can be clipped from newspapers, etc., and pre- 
served to be copied later. 

There is no better way of arranging a window 
to make it show what is in it and attract the at- 
tention of every one who goes by, than to use the 
focusing scheme. 

It goes like this : Tack to your window frame 
all the way around except the bottom, the ends 
of strips of cheese cloth, say pink. Place a small 
box at the back of the window. Bring the loose 

128 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

ends of the cheese cloth fastened to the top of the 
window over the top of the box and tack them 
there. If jour window is six feet across and the 
box two feet, make the six feet wide of cloth into 
folds or plaits so that it shall just rea>ch across 
the two feet of box. That will make the folds of 
the cloth diverge from the box toward the sides of 
the window. That's the top. 

Bring the strips from one side of the window to 
the back of the corresponding side of the box. 
That makes a side which is uniform with the 
top. Then dress up the box and bottom of the 
window with the pink cloth. 

Put in your goods, with a prominent card in 
the centre and you are ready to close up the other 
sides. 

I fixed a window that way with sarsaparilla. 
The card in the centre said " makes you well. 
60c a bottle, 6 bottles $3.00." The pink color 
showed for a long way up and down the street 
and scarcely anyone got by, even on the opposite 

129 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

side of the street without seeing the window. No 
one went by on my side without seeing what the 
window meant. 

Until you have tried it or seen it tried, you 
have no idea of how it brings out those goods in 
the centre on the box. It is a practical impossi- 
bility to even glance at that window without see- 
ing just what it means. The window proved a 
big hit with me as similar windows always have. 
The expense of such a decoration, with cheese 
cloth at 6c a yard, is about 75c and the cloth is 
good for any number of times. 

The same plan of drapery may be used in 
various forms which will occur to you with ex- 
perience. The cheesecloth strips may be used as 
simply a background from the bottom of the 
windows to the ceiling. Tack them all the way 
around the back of the window and bring them 
to the middle where the ends may be tied, or form 
a fan-like drapery which shall focus at the 
middle of the bottom of the window's back edge. 

130 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

It is a very simple matter to arrange, with 
nothing but a few boxes and boards a series of 
steps in the window. You can make them a dif- 
ferent shape each time and change the draping 
to any color or combination of colors desired. 

Crepe tissue at six or seven cents for ten feet 
is cheap enough for anyone to use. 

A window arranged like the pink one de- 
scribed, only with a light blue cloth instead and 
some handsome box papers in the centre, would 
be hard to beat. 

A good way to display envelopes is to pile up 
the loose packages promiscuously in the middle 
with full boxes for sides and back. 

Be very careful not to leave paper or envelopes 
too long exposed to the light or they will get a 
yellow tinge — look shop worn and faded. 

In summer of course the flies are a nuisance 
which can best be avoided by having glass backs 
to your windows. That is a big expense. Try 
mosquito netting from floor to ceiling to keep 

131 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

thein out. It will do it pretty effectually and 
cost little. 

In the winter, frost is an enemy. It obscures 
the view and melts to drip and spatter the goods. 
There are numerous glycerine mixtures which 
are recommended for keeping off the frost but 
none of them are perfectly satisfactory. Here 
is one that perhaps comes as near it as any : 

Prepare a mixture in the proportion of three 
fluid ounces of alcohol to one of glycerine. Shake 
it well before using; then spread it thinly over 
the inside of the window panes with soft cloth. 
At first it may be necessary to apply it every 
day to produce the desired effect. 

The best way to keep off frost is to heat your 
store with a hot air furnace, taking the air from 
outdoors direct, This should give you a perfectly 
dry heat which leaves no chance for moisture to 
accumulate. 

One druggist made capital out of the frost last 
winter. He painted the upper part of the win- 

132 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

dow, well down, with a mixture of ale and solu- 
tion of epsom salts. It gave the glass a fine frosty 
appearance, and by running down a few streaks 
to look like icicles and dressing the window in- 
side in white he had a striking ground for show T - 
ing ebony goods— or any other goods. 

Make your displays timely when outdoor 
sports are in season, if you sell sporting goods 
give them window room. In foot ball time you 
can make a hit with brownie figures playing the 
game. Have the game labeled like the last game 
your local team played — and don't forget to 
make the display advertise some kind of goods. 

School opening gives you a wide range, includ- 
ing tablets, schools books, pencils, note books, 
globes, black boards stuff, etc. 

Put in your tablets, all your brightest colors to 
the front, a few days before school opens. That 
will post fhe children on where to go when they 
start out for school on the first morning. 

A corn, pumpkin and grain trimmed window 

133 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

is good in the fall if your window is of good size. 
Make the corn, etc., the decorations which only 
serve to draw attention to the goods. Don't make 
the decorations the main thing in the window. 
They should be but the means to an end. 

Evergreen trimmings are the thing in Decem- 
ber of course. Running pine and the like are 
easy to use and last well. The Christmas tree in 
the window is played out. 

You always have enough goods to use at Christ- 
mas time so that you can change as often as you 
like. Perfumes are good to use on the last days 
before Christmas. People use them as a sort 
of last resort. 

Books are attractive window goods — easy to 
arrange and easy to change. Christmas pape- 
teries can't stay long in the window if the 
weather is bright but they look well there. 

Some dealers say — don't put prices on goods 
in windows at holiday times. People won't buy 
when everybody knows the price — it gives them 
away on what they give away. 

134 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

People aren't thinking so far as all that. Pve 
tried both ways myself and I am going to put on 
the prices always. 

Cough medicines are available all winter. I 
don't mean the patent cough cures. Don't, for 
heaven's sake, give up your windows to the patent 
medicine people when you have anything else to 
sell. People won't stop long to w r atch the antics 
of a " Pale Pill " dummy carton or a somebody's 
sarsaparilla package. 

A city druggist who had a window full of good 
goods, arranged a small w r ooden ball to swing 
by clock work and just tap the window at every 
sw r ing. No one passed that window without look- 
ing towards it. 

It is half in getting the people to look toward 
your window. They will stop much oftener if 
their attention is arrested by something which 
does not wait for them to turn their heads first. 

The beauty of the scheme of the pink (or 
other color) cheese cloth as described is that one 

135 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

must see that color — " willy, nilly." You can't 
pass it without being aware of the presence of a 
big pink spot. 

A bulletin board at the curb with " Look in 
my window " on it will help some. 

Don't allow loafers to stand inside and look 
out of the windows. Don't do it yourself. Ladies 
will not stop and look through a window when 
there is a man or two staring at them from 
within. Best to have the background of the 
window too high to see over. 

The window is of more use to show the goods 
in it than to display the inside of your store. 

If you are an amateur photographer, you have 
a means of attracting people to your windows 
easily. There's nothing people like better to look 
at than photographs. Whatever your window 
exhibit, a picture here and there in it will help 
vastly. 

If you have been in the habit of taking care of 
the window dressing yourself, take a rest. Let 

136 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

the clerk try his hand. He may have more nat- 
ural talent in that direction than you have. 

Tell him what goods you want displayed and 
let him work the scheme out for himself. En- 
courage clerks to advance ideas anyway. A clerk 
who can think for you will be worth a lot of 
money to you some day. 

Let your window displays follow your news- 
paper and circular advertising as nearly as pos- 
sible. Make your various advertising plans play 
into one another's hands. 

If you want to make a telling exhibit of play- 
ing cards, write the manufacturers giving the 
size of your window and they will send you dis- 
play stuff, dummy packages, sample cards for 
festoons, posters, etc. They will send you, too, 
a book of cuts of window displays by other drug- 
gists, giving you good ideas. 

Stationery makers usually have more or less 
plunder available for display. They are always 
glad to enclose such things with an order. 

137 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

If you want to sell crepe tissue, you can get 
up a particularly rich window. Festoon the 
red, white and blue strips from the center of the 
window top to a line across the back, about half 
way up, the built up steps can be used for the 
bottom and back of the display and the charac- 
ter of it must depend upon the stock of crepe 
which you have on hand. Opened boxes set 
around promiscuously, interspersed with bou- 
quets of tissue, chrysanthemums and roses. 
There is no limit to the extent you can go in 
getting up something elaborate in this line. 

A good toothpick window can be made with a 
short log pretty well hacked up. Put it in the 
window with an axe or hatchet stuck into it and 
spread lots of chips and splinters around. Then 
put in brow r nie figures picking up the splinters 
in baskets. Pile up boxes of toothpicks in a 
corner. Use a big card. Toothpicks 10c per box. 

A good use can be made of the original pack- 
ages in which imported drugs come. If you live 

138 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

in a city where there's a wholesaler you can bor- 
row the empty packages. If he is too far away 
beg for them and pay the freight. 

There is always an air of interest about an 
import package that will attract people and in- 
terest them. It doesn't take much stock to make 
such packages look full. 

I've used Hunyadi cases in the window with 
cuts from a drug journal showing Buda-Pest, 
etc. The exhibit told people about a water that 
lots of them hadn't heard of before. They bought 
it, too. 

Save your original cases so as to use two or 
three of them at once. People will think you are 
a big buyer. 

It is easy and profitable to practice a little in- 
nocent deception of that sort upon the public 
occasionally. 

A window which got me seme free advertising 
was a display of old books. I had a few myself 
and borrowed more of the musty looking old 

139 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

things and the result was an astonishing amount 
of interest. 

After that I had lots of people ask me if I 
wouldn't like some certain old book of theirs to 
use next time. By putting into such an exhibit 
one or two of the very newest things in book 
styles you can draw comparisons which will be 
interesting — " Book making 300 years ago and 
book making to-day." 

A prize for the oldest book produced — to be 
loaned for a window exhibit will get you some 
rare ones. 

A nice way to show up tooth stuff is to place a 
board lengthwise of the window, the front edge 
on the bottom, next the glass, and the board 
nearly upright, sloping back a little to make a 
bank. 

Build a platform level with the top edge of the 
board. Cover the whole with some colored stuff. 

Set the tooth brushes on end along the little 
bank. Put such a display of powders or liquid 

140 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

dentifrice as you see fit along the top. There's 
the chance for a good window. 

A window sign that I've found it good to 
use, is a strip — use 6-inch wrapping paper folded 
to three inches wide — reaching the width of the 
window and laid on the bottom next the glass, 
in front of everything else. You can put on quite 
a sentence and be sure of its getting read. 

A sponge window can be made of packing 
boxes with holes stove in in odd places. Stuff 
sponges into the holes to make it look as if the 
boxes were full of sponges which are bursting 
out. 

A sponge man is not very difficult to make 
and will be the cause of much humorous com- 
ment. 

A druggist who sold much violet toilet water, 
covered the bottom of his window T with violet 
crfrpe tissue, spread artificial violets around 
loosely and tipped up a five-gallon carboy of the 
violet water in the centre, with plenty of smaller 

141 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

bottles of it. Maybe the carboy was empty. I 
don't know. It looked as if it was full. 

A good window plan is an arch which will 
reach from side to side and go pretty well up. 
Put it close to the glass and drape from it back to 
a centre, like that first cheesecloth arrangement. 
It varies the effect. 

Mirrors can be used in almost any window, 
but they should be good mirrors. 

I have often wondered why the crude drug 
people who sell hellebore, insect powder and such 
things that are sold in large quantities even by 
the smaller dealers, have not tried to work the 
window display scheme as the proprietary peo- 
ple do. 

If some shrewd manufacturer should get up a 
window display outfit to go with every 25 or 50 
pounds of his hellebore — the outfit consisting of 
pictures illustrating the different processes in 
the growth and manufacture of the drug, with 
small samples of it at different stages from the 

142 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

crude to the finished state — he would steal a 
march on his competitors. The outfits could be 
supplied to jobbers for enclosure. I only in- 
stance hellebore because it is an article which 
is particularly susceptible to advertising. 

A soda fountain window can be made in fruit 
time. Use plenty of draperies. Put a big dish 
of fruit in the middle and set around it soda 
glasses with paper napkins tucked in them — a 
bundle or so of straws — cards reading, " Pure 
fruit flavors at our fountain " ; " Good fruit 
makes good soda " ; " Good soda costs you no 
more than bad soda/' etc. 

A window that will draw a crowd, though it 
can't be made to advertise a special line very 
well, is a poison window. Borrow a skull from 
your doctor. Take a pack of playing cards, a 
whiskey bottle with a paper snake coming out 
of it; labeled packages (dummies if you like) 
of arsenic, strychnine, opium, morphine, paris 
green, etc. These, with plenty of red cloth, or 

143 



EETAIL ADVERTISING 

crepe paper and poison labels should at least jar 
people's nerves. 

This can be made a very interesting display, 
too, by giving the fatal doses of the various 
poisons. Put in a card, " Here's enough poison 
to kill everybody in town and have some left 

for ." Fill in that blank with the name of 

your rival town. 

If you have a large window, put in a wheelbar- 
row (you can borrow a new one of the hardware 
dealer) tipped up and a lot of bottles of some 
one of your special medicines — say beef, wine 
and iron — piling out of it on the floor. 

Sprinkle cards around reading, " Here's what 
cures you, 50c " ; " The blood maker, 50c " ; 
" System builder, 50c " ; " Wheelbarrow load of 
health in each bottle." 

Goldenrod grows most everywhere. It lasts 
well, too, in water. Fix up a big bunch or bank 
of it in a corner of the window. Green things in 
a window always look refreshing and always, 
always mind you, attract the attention of women. 

144 






FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Make a borax map. On dark paper on the 
window bottom, outline the streets of your town 
with powdered borax. Name them properly, 
and then put in a small white box, with windows 
and doors drawn on it, for your store. Put your 
name across the front of the little " store " and 
locate it at the right point on the right street. 

Sacks or boxes of borax can be placed in such 
parts of the window^ as are not occupied by the 
map. A big card " The Borax House in Borax 
Town," or " We are the Borax people ! " and a 
price per pound are needed to make the display 
complete. You will be surprised at the interest 
the map will awaken. 

If you sell the magazines it will pay you to 
give one window to them at the first of the month 
— or perhaps better, the last of the month pre- 
vious. 

They are bright, new, and easily shown, and 
you generally have a few posters to help out the 
showing. Put in a half dozen of the last books, 
too. 

145 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

If you do this regularly people will get into the 
habit of depending on your window to tell them 
when the new publications are out. 

A grocer I know had a big lot of earthenware 
pudding pans. He put them in the window with 
a little unsightly card hidden away in one corner 
— " Pudding pans, 10c." 

If he had made a sign that had occupied half 
his window, saying 

" PUDDING PANS, lie." 
he would have had everybody looking to see what 
they were. The odd price would have sold those 
pans where he didn't sell them at 10c. 

He had a> chance to make a little sensation 
and didn't know it. Don't let such opportunities 
go by. You may not get a name that will attract 
like the homely but odd " Pudding Pans," but 
you will have chances of some sort, 

A sign card in a western window (such things 
are always laid to the west) read 

Peppermint He for 
Hed-ake 
Bellie-ake 
Tooth-ake. 

146 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

That's a rather rough card but the idea is 
good. It is plain and to the point. It covers all 
the ground. Window signs should be brief and 
to the point. 

Whatever your window display, be it simple or 
elaborate, be sure that it is fresh and clean. 
Thrifty — that is the word. Make your windows 
look thrifty — as if you were doing business every 
minute. 

As the windows are, so will the store be, and 
people know it. 



147 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 



Odds and Ends 

ry Y odds and ends, I mean any kind of adver- 
-"-^ tising not talked about in the other chap- 
ters ; novelties in the way of advertising ; schemes 
available for the store, circulars or newspapers. 

I have already said, don't bother with the 
stranger who comes around with schemes to 
introduce. Get up your own. 

There are a good many which are really profit- 
able and involve small expense. 

School children are more easily interested in 
such things than anyone else, and inasmuch as 
they are good customers of the druggist and es- 
pecially of the stationer, they are good people to 
encourage to come to the store. They are your 
most discriminating customers. They soon grow 

148 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

up, too, you know, and " as the twig is bent so is 
the tree inclined." 

The aim of every scheme as it is the aim of all 
other advertising, is to create favorable comment 
about your store, to let more people know you're 
there, and to get the other fellows' customers in. 

Whenever you get a new customer into your 
store, you have a chance to make him a perma- 
nent visitor. ( See that you do it — or at least do 
your part.) 

Customers are guests and more than that, they 
are guests that pay. They ought to be entitled 
to even better treatment than an ordinary visitor. 
How t many store-keepers forget that and are 
afraid to make a sale anything more than a 
purely business transaction? Be social with 
your customers, most of them like it. 

When the people don't all come, or don't come 
fast enough on ordinary newspaper and circular 
advertising, try your inventive genius on some 
particular attraction to present to them. 

149 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

A plan recently tried by a number of dealers is 
the following: 

Have several thousand voting cards printed 
for free distribution among the children of the 
town (you'll want a few dodgers to explain the 
scheme). 

Place in your window two Al prizes, one for 
a boy and one for a girl. These prizes are to be 
given to the boy and girl receiving the most votes 
before a given time, named on the tickets. Offer 
prizes of a smaller value to all receiving more 
than a certain number of votes, say 50. The 
votes are to be cast in this way : everyone making 
a purchase at your store — any size purchase — is 
entitled to cast a ballot for any child they like. 

The children are to be supplied with all the 
votes they will distribute. Every child will give 
them to friends with the request that they leave 
a vote when they make ai purchase at your store. 

Be sure to get plenty of tickets at first so as 
to keep the children supplied while their interest 
keeps up. 

150 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Don't make the mistake of allowing the con- 
test to run too long. Such things must culmi- 
nate before people tire of them in order to be suc- 
cessful, and don't give out figures on the progress 
of the contest until it is closed, or those who are 
low will lose their interest. 

Of comment on the plan it is only necessary to 
say that wherever tried it has been almost uni- 
formly successful in aiding business very ma- 
terially. One maoi claims a 25 per cent, increase. 

Of course, there may be towns where the plan 
would not be advisable. 

Voting schemes are used very largely by news- 
papers to gain subscribers and seem to be suc- 
cessful. Why not try it in your business? 

A plan which I have used myself with good 
results is the following. I will simply give the 
four newspaper ads in the case. They will tell 
the story. Ad No. 1 

$2.00 Cash Prize for School Children. 

We offer a prize of two dollars in cash for 
151 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

the best advertisement of School Tablets 
written by a student of any Delhi school. 
The advertisement must be entirely the work 
of the scholar submitting it. It must be of 
suitable size to fill our regular newspaper 
space. 

Write with pen or pencil on unruled tablet 
paper and sign your full name. Spelling 
and punctuation will be considered in 
awarding the prize. 
There are no charges of any kind. 
The contest closes when our store closes— 
9 P. M. Feb. 14. 

Ea.ch student may submit but one advertise- 
ment. 

Farrington's Drug Store. 

Book Store, too. 
Ad No. 2 

That $2.00 Offer. 

If you go to school you can enter our adver- 
tisement contest. 
It doesn't cost you a cent 
and you may get the 
two dollars. 

152 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Someone will get it, you know. 
Particulars more detailed will be found in 
our advertising space in last week's 
" Express." 

Farrington's Drug Store. 

Book Store, too. 
Ad No. 3. 
We have selected from the many ads sub- 
mitted in the contest, two which we consider 
equally entitled to the prize. 
One that of Helen Hutson Hall, we give 
below; the other, Ethel Grace Lord's will 
occupy our space next week. The prize has 
been divided equally between these two con- 
testants. 

Tablets! School Tablets! ! 
Tablets large and tablets small, 
Tablets here for one and all ; 
Tablets here for you and me, 
If you don't believe it come and see. 

Tablets here you're sure to find, 
Cheap and of a better kind ; 
153 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Farrington's the man that sells 
Tablets and he treats you well. 

Ad No. 4. 
Below is the advertisement written by Ethel 
Grace Lord who was an equal prize winner 
with Helen Hutson Hall in our prize contest. 

Attention ! 

It is hard for some children who buy tablets 

to decide which place to go. 

If you go to Farrington's once 

you will have no doubt where 

to go in the future. 

Rough and smooth paper. 

Pretty and fancy covers. 

Come and look them over, 

everyone. 

Farrington's Drug Store. 

The value of the scheme as an advertisement 
was not dependent upon the number of answers 
received. The number was smaller than I had 
anticipated, but there followed a good gain in 
tablet business and the interest awakened was 

154 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

not confined by any means to the school children 
or even to their parents. It was general. It 
made talk, favorable talk. 

A jeweller to whom I had mentioned the suc- 
cess of my prize scheme, directly after offered a 
prize of $2.00 for the biggest apple brought in 
within some two weeks. All the apples were to 
be placed in a window exhibition at the expira- 
tion of the given time. 

The season was March. Think of such an ad 
in March ! No one has apples then, let alone big 
apples. There wasn't any exhibition. 

I may be wrong but it looked like a poor choice 
of time of year and a poor choice of scheme. The 
idea may not have been suggested by mine, but to 
the general public it had the appearance of an 
imitation. 

To give the public an opportunity to think 
that, is always a mistake. However original your 
idea may be, if the people think it an imitation 
it loses its effectiveness. 

155 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

About the apple scheme — it would answer bet- 
ter for a fruit store than a jewelry store. If you 
are offering a prize make it for something which 
pertains to your store and will produce an inter- 
est in your stock aside from that which centers 
simply in the prize winner. 

Suppose that a druggist should offer two dol- 
lars for the best high school student's essay 
about lead pencils, helping the thing along with 
a pencil window display showing all sorts of 
pencils, and pictures indicating the processes in 
manufacture from the tree to the finished prod- 
uct. Placing in his window, in fact all the in- 
formation possible to help on those essays, 
wouldn't that stimulate his pencil trade — all his 
trade with the students, for that matter? 

A competition of that sort is practical when 
based on lead pencils or any one of a dozen other 
things. 

The teachers will be with you in such schemes 
and will advise the children to compete. Limit 

156 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

such an essay to 200 words, or 300; get an out- 
sider for a judge and it will be a success. 

A plan which can be used in some cases on 
some lines of goods is to put a cash prize in an 
occasional package. In our business, the cig- 
arette or tobacco package is the best place to try 
it. You cannot advertise it (the law prevents) 
all you can do is to slip a quarter, half, or dollar 
into a package of cigarettes or tobacco and see 
that some one gets it who will spread the news. 
Then watch your tobacco sales grow. Put in 
another prize after a time, if the plan proves 
worth following. 

Manufacturers of the goods you handle will 
often assist you to push them in novel ways. 

Our tow r n had a big celebration, all our fire- 
men and bands were to be in the parade. The 
manufacturers of a certain violet perfume sent 
me cloth violet boutonnieres, each with a pink 
ribbon attached, printed " Souvenir Delhi Cen- 
tennial — date — Compliments Farrington's Drug 

157 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Store." They sent enough to decorate every 
Delhi man in the parade. All the expense to me 
was the trouble of getting them on the men as 
they were forming the line. That was simply 
fun. Each boutonniere was perfumed with the 
brand of violet in question and was preserved to 
be for a long time a reminder of my store. The 
newspaper comment, which I wrote myself, and 
had inserted without charge was very favorable. 
So was the verbal comment w r hich was not of 
my making. 

A perfume ad which failed was another at the 
expense of a manufacturer who sold me a certain 
number of bottles of a carnation odor and threw 7 
in 400 blotters perfumed with the odor, also a 
large bottle to be used in spraying the opera 
house seats just previous to a performance which 
drew a big house. I personally saw to the spray- 
ing of the house — all the perfume was used. The 
blotters were handed to people as they entered. 
If the perfume permeated the room to any ap- 

158 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

preciable extent, no one knew it. I have some 
of that perfume yet. 

One druggist perfumed his newspaper space 
and advertised the fact, but the perfume disap- 
peared before the paper reached its readers, and 
that plan apparently failed. 

A little scheme which is sometimes successful 
is that of putting a red spot on your newspaper 
ad on some occasion when you have a very im- 
portant announcement to make. The printers 
will arrange for the operation and the added 
prominence may be worth the extra expense — or 
it may not. 

Without going into questionable methods you 
can work off a lot of slow going box papers by 
charring the boxes a little with fire and adver- 
tising 

Fire Damaged Paper ! 

Our box paper stock — or part of it, at 
least — got too close to the fire. The outsides 
of a lot of boxes were burned and charred 
enough to spoil their appearance, but 
159 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

The Paper's All Right. 

On not a single box did the tire get to the 
inside. 

Of course the appearance of the boxes is 
damaged and we will sell them at prices ac- 
cordingly. 

Then go on with your prices. You have people 
interested and they will come to see. 

The paper will go if you put the price down 
where it belongs. You Avill attract attention, 
make talk and get rid of your shop worn stock. 

The store paper is getting to be quite generally 
used and often not to much advantage. Of 
course the postal regulations are such that you 
cannot mail a private publication as second class 
matter. The department is very strict about it 
too. You have got to pay the penny postage and 
a store paper, as it is commonly made up — three 
columns of cheap plate matter to one of talk 
about your store does not give value received. 

A good circular will do you more good than al- 

160 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

most any " store paper " ever made. I do not 
condemn store papers wholesale. There are 
good ones but I think that for the retail stationer 
or druggist they are not worth their cost. 

A form of advertising which generally fails to 
pay directly but Avhich may make you new friends 
is the giving away of advertising match safes, 
purses and all such novelties. Good will is about 
all you can get out of such things. 

If you have a good prescription business or 
ought to have, you can afford to give the phy- 
sicians prescription blanks in nice leather cases 
— but that is more a case of getting good will 
than anything else. You may have to do it in 
self-defence — because someone else does it. 

When you get in a new line of ream goods 
from the manufacturers ( it's better to buy direct 
from the manufacturer) have them send you 
samples of the paper to mail to your lady cus- 
tomers with suitable talk. 

Small advertising blotters are put in the pape- 
161 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

terie boxes of some makers and if you are a good 
customer they will supply you with a quantity of 
them to send with the samples of paper. You 
will get results. Stamp your own name on the 
blotters. Stamp your name too on the blotters 
that are in the boxes you sell. 

If your box papers do not have blotters in, 
have some advertising blotters of your own 
printed and insert them. 

Do you have rubber stamps where they are 
convenient to use. Their uses are very many. 
Small gummed labels with just the name of your 
store are good things to put on the outside of 
wrapped bottle packages. Don't be afraid to 
have your name on everything that goes out of 
the store. You oughtn't to send out anything 
that wouldn't do you credit. 

Pay envelopes are sometimes used for adver- 
tising. Any mill where the hands are paid in 
envelopes will let you furnish the envelopes free 
and place an ad below the blank lines left for 

162 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

name of payee, etc. It will cost you from $5.00 
to $8.00 to get ten thousand of the envelopes with 
printing. It will probably not pay very well and 
the chances are that it will not pay at all. If 
the mill shuts down (as one did which I supplied 
with envelopes) you are an easy loser. 

Whatever scheme you arrange which involves 
expense, be sure that it is going to draw new 
trade. The value of such a plan for instance, 
as the voting contest mentioned above, depends 
upon its ability to get enough new trade to pay 
for your prizes. 

If your prize offers only succeed in attracting 
the attention of your regular customers they are 
an expense and nothing else. You are paying a 
premium for trade which you would have had 
anyway. 

If the expense of your plan is paid by new 
trade, even if you make nothing out of that new 
business, you will be the gainer because out of 
every hundred new people w T ho come to your 

163 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

store for some such special purpose, a certain per 
cent are going to keep coming, are going to like 
you well enough to become regular customers. 
So see to it that whatever your scheme, it be 
made attractive to the other fellow's customers. 

A plan which has often proved to be too much 
inclined to affect only the old customers is that 
of giving out cards with a large number of small 
figures on them, footing up to perhaps $10.00. 
When all the figures are punched out you give a 
prize. 

The plan has rarely brought enough new busi- 
ness to justify it. Anyway it is an old story now 
and a scheme, be it never so attractive, loses its 
drawing power when it gets old. 

Do you handle photographic supplies? If not, 
you'd better, but anyway why don't you try a 
prize offer to amateurs for the best photograph 
of local scenery? Make your first prize good 
enough to be worth while and give enough minor 
prizes (supplies and the like) to encourage every- 
one to enter. 

164 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Make it a condition that each photograph sub- 
mitted become your property. You will get 
enough for a window display and perhaps enough 
for an inside exhibition. Such a prize offer as 
that, it is good advertising to make an annual 
affair. It will boom your sale of photo-chem- 
icals and other supplies in that line. 

A plan sometimes successful is to giye away a 
4x5 photograph with eyery purchase amounting 
to a certain sum. There are plenty of variations 
which can be introduced in the way of difference 
in the sizes of the pictures for different sized 
purchases. 

It is well to put a time limit of so many w r eeks 
or months on such a scheme, because you will 
not want to keep it up indefinitely. Be careful 
to see that the other fellow's customers know 
about the offer. 

Gift schemes can sometimes proye a disadvan- 
tage. A little Jew in my town once advertised 
that on a certain afternoon, shortly before Christ- 

165 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

mas, Santa Claus would be at his store and give 
away a present to every school child who came. 

A made up Santa Claus was on hand in the 
window on the afternoon advertised and when 
the public school was out, the store was sur- 
rounded, mobbed, filled and overrun with small 
boys and girls, until the proprietor had to drive 
them out by main force with the assistance of 
Santa Claus and lock the doors front and rear. 
That was a case of too much of a good thing. 

Some druggists get out a book of recipes which 
gives formulas of value for every disease from 
pimples to paralysis, with the prices charged for 
compounding the same at their store. They 
usually quote prices too on quite a list of house- 
hold drugs. Such books are almost always 
profitable. You can tell whether they pay or not 
because you know when the recipes come in to be 
filled. 

Ads to slip into packages of goods — " slip ads " 
— are good things. They cost very little and 

166 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

often make a sale. They should be printed in 
about the style of your newspaper ad and only 
one thing on a slip. Have the printer take your 
ad right out of the newspaper form and run off a 
lot of slips with it. You won't even have the 
type setting to pay for in that case.. 

Some druggists use sign boards out in the 
country. This may pay, but be careful about it. 
Don't nail signs on a man's barn or fence with- 
out permission ; it may make an enemy for your 
store instead of a customer. 

Paper napkins with your ad printed on them 
for free distribution to church socials and picnic 
parties are available for advertising, but they're 
not very profitable or original. 

The number of available advertising schemes 
is unlimited but consider the pros and cons of 
each well, before beginning it. 



167 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 



VI 



Store Management 

f~^\ IVE your store your main attention. Don't 
^* be inveigled into spending time managing 
athletic, political and other organizations that 
should be spent in managing your store. 

Your best energies should be devoted to your 
work. No one believes more firmly than I in rec- 
reation and amusement, particularly of the out- 
door sort, for business men. Druggists need the 
relaxation even more than most merchants. 

The point is, don't forget that the amusement 
is simply amusement. Be systematic about rec- 
reation, if you can, and don't let it divert your 
attention from business. 

Order is Heaven's first law. It should be an 
iron-clad store rule. A place for everything and 

168 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

everything in its place. That way saves time, 
saves money, saves stock and brings customers 
back. It makes cleanliness. Order and dirt will 
never consort. 

Kill loafing or it will kill yon. Women, the 
druggists' best customers— the stationers', too, 
only more so — will not patronize a store that is 
the habitual resort of a set of smoking (or non- 
smoking) loungers. You've got to prevent it. 
It's a difficult and ever present problem in the 
country store, but you have got to keep fighting 
it. 

Your thoughtless friends even, will block up 
your doorway, sit on your steps and stare out of 
the windows to see who's going by. What is 
worse, if you're not careful, your clerks will help 
the matter. When they are not busy, don't let 
them hang around the door, as a sign of their 
idleness and an invitation to their friends who 
want a place to stop and talk. Tate away every 
encouragement you can from the would-be 
loafers. 

169 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

How are your neighbors? There are stores 
all around you. Are they friendly enough to 
throw customers to you when they haven't the 
goods asked for? Or do they send them to the 
other fellow's store? Make it a point to call on 
your business neighbors in a friendly way once 
in a while. 

If you do not already take a trade journal, lose 
no time in subscribing for one. There are 
enough good ones in both the stationery and drug 
trades so that there is no excuse for a man who 
does not read one or more. 

Almanacs and calendars come to you free every 
year. They are mostly patent medicine a t ds, but 
people look for them always at the drug store. 
Give them aw T ay freely. 

Get a caller an almanac as cheerfully as you 
would a couple of bottles of your own sarsa- 
parilla. Treat everyone who comes into your 
store as white as you know how. 

You've been into other stores where you were 

170 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

greeted a little curtly. You know how you felt. 
You will often have to bury your personal feel- 
ings, perhaps even physical discomforts, to ap- 
pear pleasant. It's good for you though and it's 
good for your business. 

Children especially, must be treated well. 
Treat the man with the charity subscription well. 
He probably doesn't like his job. If you have 
any money don't be afraid to share it. Gen- 
erosity is the best policy. Introduce a little 
Christian charity into your business. 

Have a good big want book in a convenient 
place whatever your business. That is the great 
secret of a successful store — keeping up the 
stock. See that your clerks put things down in 
the want book. It doesn't matter if things get in 
there that you do not need. When you order you 
should know for yourself how your stock is on 
the goods you're ordering. 

Price cards are easily made and their value in 
the store is scarcely secondary to their value in 

171 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 



the window. Have all of them there is room for. 
If you can make very neat cards, it will not 
hurt any to have a wire strung at a good height 
above your counter (an almost invisible wire) 
and hang cards on it, changing them frequently. 
Don't under any circumstances leave a card or 
price ticket anywhere after it is soiled or fly- 
specked. 

Cards of your own make; plain white ones 
with plain black lettering; cards bearing pithy, 
pointed sentences are a long way ahead of any 
of the so-called artistic cards sent you by patent 
medicine houses. 

It is a foolish druggist who does not have a 
good line of his own preparations of the non- 
secret order, and push, push, push them. 

Put them up in as attractive packages as can 
be made and guarantee every package without 
reservation. Have a rubber stamp made to use 
on outside wrappers — " This medicine is guar- 
anteed by Smith's Drug Store. If it doesn't help 
you we'll buy it back." 

172 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

There is a prominent Philadelphia pharmacist 
who will not keep a clerk who cannot sell the 
firm's own preparations in eight cases out of ten 
where a particular patent is called for. That is 
putting it a little strong perhaps, but the prin- 
ciple is good and shows the general tendency. 

If the expense of running your store, which is 
doing a business of |20.00 a day, is the same as 
would pay for doing a business of $35.00 per, 
you are losing opportunities somewhere. Set 
about it to see how you can increase your busi- 
ness to the store's capacity. 

Do you carry all the lines that you could make 
money on? If you see a line of goods that you 
are not selling — that you could sell profitably — 
try that line. Do you handle souvenir postal 
cards? If you are in a town which is visited by 
many strangers you can draw trade by selling 
the cards. 

Do you handle fountain pens? Lots of drug 
and stationery stores do not handle them. Buy 

173 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

a dozen of some good dollar pen and try them 
with a little pushing. If they go you can put in 
a line of the better ones or not, as you think the 
trade warrants. It will cost but a little to try it. 

If you are a druggist and there aren't too many 
news stands in your town already, put in one. 
The magazines are mostly returnable, so that 
you never have much money invested and the 
risks are small. Daily papers and a magazine 
stock will bring people into your store. 

Are you a little careless about the wrapping of 
prescriptions? Put on bottle caps and use good 
labels. Prescriptions must show care and neat- 
ness on the outside. The public judge the con- 
tents somewhat by the package. They cannot 
often judge them on their own merits. 

Wrap and tie each bottle of any sort that goes 
out of your store. Don't roll a bottle up and give 
the paper a twist at both ends and call it 
wrapped. Neat packages are valuable ads. Al- 

174 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

ways use the best paper and twine you can get. 
People expect nice bundles from the druggist or 
stationer. There isn't anything much better than 
plain white paper and pink twine. The colored 
papers are distasteful to some people who object 
to become walking advertisements of any 
store. 

Wrap your drugs in two papers always, with 
a label on the inside wrapper. You can get a 
reputation among out-of-town folks for putting 
goods up so that they will stay wrapped until 
they reach home. 

There is no class of people who notice the little 
things of that sort any quicker than the farmers 
do. 

Do you know that wet or damp sponges will 
sell lots better than dry ones. Keep your sponges 
moist. Have a sponge case in the doorway by 
all means. It will pay for itself in six months. 
A ten-cent sponge wet feels better than a dollar 

175 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

one dry and if they are all damp you will sell 
more good sponges. The difference is more read- 
ily apparent then. 

Treat the travelling men, who call upon you, 
with courtesy and respect. They are in the same 
business that you are — selling goods. Don't al- 
low them to take up your time needlessly with 
unnecessary talk. 

Keep your old empty bottles all washed up and 
in a drawer by themselves. Use them for horse 
medicine, liniments, etc. You can get five or ten 
cents apiece for them in that way. 

When a man leaves a bottle with you to be 
filled and called for, have it ready when he comes 
after it. Don't keep people waiting any longer 
than necessary for anything. 

Particularly must soda fountain service be 
prompt. If you get the reputation of serving 
people promptly, you will gain customers among 
busy people. Busy people are the best kind of 
customers. They know what they want, buy 
quick and generally pay the cash. 

176 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Don't be afraid of the inventory. Once in two 
years will do, though every year will do better. 
It may save you a lot of money in case of fire. 
It will at least show you what your dead stock 
is and dead stock is dead money. If you've a 
lot of dead stock, get it out and put a price on it 
that will sell it. The goods are worth nothing 
and are taking up valuable room. 

Broad shelves in your store room and cellar 
are responsible for some dead stock and for 
orders sent out for goods that you already had 
plenty of. Narrow shelves show at once what 
you have. Better use more shelves and put less 
on a shelf. You can improve the broad shelves 
by making steps on them which will raise the 
goods at the back into sight, 

Use all the flowers you can at the fountain. 
They help to keep the flies from the marble slab. 
It will not do to have flies too numerous, you 
know. It ought not to be necessary to speak of 
the absolute necessity for cleanliness about the 

177 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

soda apparatus, but there are lots of fountains 
trying to do business on an anything but cleanly 
basis. 

Speaking of flowers — make some fern balls — 
wire racks with ferns growing out of them in 
all directions. Hang them in your windows. 
They relieve the artificial appearance of painted 
wood-work. House plants and palms of any sort 
are an advantage about the store. They interest 
the ladies who will always take time to ask how 
you keep them looking so well. 

Paint is cheap. Spread some on the shelving, 
etc., often. The clerks can do it and do it well. 
A little paint will work wonders in an old store. 

Have your ceiling and walls light colored. 
They will make your store ever so much brighter. 

Don't correct the man who comes in and asks 
for " camp-fire." Give him what he wants. 
You're not there to make people feel cheap. 
Your campaign of education doesn't mean that. 

You remember Pratt's anti-bilious pills? A 

178 






FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

farmer's boy came into old Dr. Pratt's store and 
said, 

" Good day, Mr. Pratt, I want a box of your 
pills." 

The doctor made several kinds of pills and 
looking over hfs glasses at the boy he asked, 

"Anti-bilious?" 

" No," said the youngster, " Uncle's sick." 

Dr. Pratt waited until he got behind the pre- 
scription desk before he smiled. That was an 
exceptional case in all ways. You could not 
have blamed the doctor for laughing before his 
customer then. 

Do you carry a stock of law blanks? If you 
do, you know that with five or six hundred dif- 
ferent numbers it's a hard stock to keep up. 
You've got to keep it full though. If you get a 
reputation among the lawyers for having every 
time the blank they are after you will get the 
trade. If they begin to find you out of what they 
ask for it won't take long for you to get a reputa- 
tion quite the opposite. 

179 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Keep your school tablets so exhibited that the 
children can see what you have. It's a good plan 
to have an assortment of them on the counter 
where the urchins can paw them over. They 
always want to see all of the five-cent ones any- 
way. You can't afford to be cranky with them. 

How are your showcases dressed? We cannot 
all have handsome cases. Yours may be no two 
alike and yet you can make them look well. Get 
them placed to the best advantage, then take as 
much pains in dressing them as you would in 
dressing windows. Change them frequently. 
Keep good selling things on top where people 
can get at them. They won't be stolen. Put 
that much confidence in your customers. 

Neglect no chance to display goods. Goods 
well displayed are half sold. Put lots of plain 
prices on them. 

Have all your goods, even to empty bottles and 
corks, marked with cost and selling price. That 
keeps your price uniform to every customer. 

X80 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Nothing is more harmful than ragged prices; 
one price to one man, another to another. You, 
yourself would kick if you had the other end of 
that deal. 

Don't get cross with people who come in and 
look over your magazine and novel stock for a 
half hour and then don't buy. Suppose they are 
working you. They buy something occasionally, 
even if it isn't a magazine. You have to be im- 
posed upon to a certain extent and this sort of 
imposition will not hurt you any. Those people 
go away and talk about what they have seen on 
your counters — that means sales sometime. 

When a woman buys goods enough to really 
make a package, why don't you offer to send it 
home for her? The grocer would. Do you want 
to be beaten in store methods by the grocer? 

You can make friends by offering to deliver 
even when you know the offer will be declined. 

I know of a man who has entire charge of the 
cigar department of half a dozen New York drug 

181 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

stores. He buys all the cigars, keeps the cases 
clean and filled — takes into his hands the whole 
business except the selling. 

You don't need a man like that. You can keep 
the cigar case up better yourself, but are you 
doing it? Are you selling your share of cigars? 
Make 'em pay your rent. When you have them 
so they will do that, make them pay your light 
bill, too. Don't let up on them as long as there's 
room to go farther fthead. 

Cigar buyers are as fastidious about their 
cigars as a woman is about her perfumes. See 
that you are coming up to their wants — antici- 
pating them even. 

You can put cards on your cigar case that 

would be out of place anywhere else. I had the 

following — clipped from a drug journal — on my 

cigar lighter for a time, causing considerable 

amusement : 

To trust is to bust, 

To bust is hell, 

No trust, no bust, 

No bust, no hell. 

182 



FOR DEUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

The verse is so clever that the roughness of it 
is excusable. 

Have your cigar case next to the door. Keep 
the lighter clean and bright and it will always 
be a sign that the cigars are there. You can 
make friends for your cigar business by offering 
a box of matches to everyone who buys two or 
three cigars. Buy the parlor matches in the 
smallest boxes — I think they come in 40s. They 
cost but a trifle. Put your name on each box — 
sticker or rubber stamp. It is cheap generosity. 

They say that genius is the capacity for taking 
infinite pains. 

Success in business requires genius. It re- 
quires you to take great pains with little things. 
Business is mostly made up of little things. The 
drug and stationery business is more so than 
many. If you wait for the big deals, you will get 
hungry w r aiting. 

There are a few druggists doing a big business 
with their stock every which way. I know a 

183 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

drug store where the box papers are piled, or 
rather jumbled together promiscuously on a 
counter and an open shelf. All over the top of 
the heap are spread boxes with the covers off, 
dust settling on the contents, and everybody 
thumbing the paper over. That store does a big 
stationery business, but you can figure for your- 
self how much more it might do and how much 
more money it might make on what it does do. 

I do not say that a man cannot do a paying 
business in an untidy store, but it does not need 
me to tell you that it is in spite of the dirt and 
not on account of it. 

If you sell both candy and soda water have 
the candy case next to the soda fountain if possi- 
ble. Make your soda help sell your other goods. 
Make one line draw attention to some other 
whenever you can. 

Do you have a lot of vacant space between the 
tops of your wall cases and the ceiling? If you 
haven't a nice wall, metal ceiling and all that 

184 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

kind of thing, that space will look better filled 
up with stock than it will empty. 

Full packages of writing tablets or box papers 
in cartons; full dozens of proprietary remedies, 
those all pile up neatly, and if they are kept 
free from dust, make your stock look better as 
well as larger. 

A store which gives one the appearance of 
being full of goods will lead people to go back 
there for things they couldn't find elsewhere. 

If your store has a rear or side window, be it 
seen by ever so few, keep it clean. You don't 
want to be judged like a man who keeps the toes 
of his boots polished and lets the heels go muddy. 
Don't be shiftless. 

If your store has irregularities in its walls or 
posts anywhere, even in the windows, make them 
serve you. Don't wonder how to become resigned 
to their presence. They may be valuable to help 
show goods. 

In a word, let slip no available opportunity for 
185 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

improving your store and your store service. 
Don't wait for the opportunities to offer them- 
selves — hunt for them. Fortune is not throwing 
herself at anyone's head. 



186 






FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 



VII 

One Hundred Sample Ads 

r I ^HESE ads were all written for use in a 
single column, 3-inch space. Some of them 
could be made much longer and still go into that 
space easily. Some could be cut down and not be 
too small. They can be changed to suit, you 
know. 

Sauce For The Goose 

may not be sauce for the gander. 

The cough medicines that helps your cough 

might not touch your neighbor's. 

If you think that our " White Pine and 

Tar " is not the best thing for your case, try 

our new cure, " Tolu, Tar and Wild Cherry." 

One of the two kinds will hit almost any 

cough a knock out blow. 

They are both guaranteed to help the cough. 

White Pine and Tar, 20c. Tolu, Tar and 

Wild Cherry, 25c. 

187 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Sunburn Cure. 

The sunburn cure that will really cure sun- 
burn is our Velvet Cream. 
It is good for all sorts of skin discomforts, 
such as come with July heat. 
You'll like it. We know you'll like it. 
It is easily used and possesses many advan- 
tages over the sticky glycerine, vaseline and 
the like. 

We guarantee it to give you satisfaction. 
It is 22c a bottle. 

We have the cold cream in little jars — with 
nickle screw caps for 15c. 

Blank Books For The New Year. 

Not many business people but have to get 
at least one or two new blank books at the 
opening of the year. 

It may be a full set of books; it may be a 
new cash book, or it may be only a 5c memo- 
randum. We have them all. 
500 page ledgers and journals from 90c up. 
We buy direct from the maker. That saves 
the middleman's profit. We give you the 
advantage of that saving. 
We sell diaries, too. 
188 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Always Had Them 

but never said so before, at least we never 

advertised them. That's pens. Fine pens, 

coarse pens, long pens, short pens and stub 

pens. 

All kinds, six for 5c. 

Double pointed ruling pens, two cents each. 

We sell a fountain pen — hard rubber barrel, 

for 25c. 

Combination reversible pen and pencil, 5c. 

Will Make You Well. 
That's our sarsaparilla. 
There's no better spring medicine made. 
If you are thinking of trying Hood's, Ayer's, 
Brown's, or some other, buy a bottle of ours 
instead. 

We guarantee it to be as good as the best. 
What's more, w r e guarantee it to make you 
well. 

If you are not perfectly satisfied after using 
a bottle, come and get your 60c. 
That's the price we ask — 60c a bottle. The 
other kinds are a dollar and we cannot guar- 
antee them. 

189 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

We know what is in ours and what it will 
do. Six bottles for |3.00. 

Cheap Fountain Pens That Are Good. 

A dollar fountain pen that's up to lots of 

two-dollar ones ; that's the 

We sell them. 

Fine, medium and coarse points. Fourteen 

karat gold pen. 

What's the difference between these and 

better grades? 

This— the $1.50 and the $2.00— last longer. 

They're no better while they last. 

The dollar ones last long enough to suit 

most writers. 

Come and try a . We will lend you 

paper, ink and a desk. 

Our Sarsaparilla. 

We back it to knock out that old tired feel- 
ing in short order. 

It is a spring medicine that will make you 
well. 

How's your blood? 
How's your appetite? 
Are you bilious? 

190 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Our sarsaparilla will straighten you up and 

give you a new lease of life. 

We guarantee it, you know. 

Sixty cents a bottle. Six bottles for f 3.00. 

We have all the standard sarsaparillas at a 

dollar a bottle. 

A Necessary Frog- 
is " Frog-in-your-throat " — 10c. 
We have commenced our big winter sale of 
this great cough lozenge and want everyone 
who has throat trouble to try it. 
It is the best cough drop made, for nine 
cases out of ten. 

If yours is the tenth case you can have your 
money back again. 

Slippery Elm. 

Just about now 'most everyone has a sore 
throat or a cough. 

Why not try slippery elm lozenges? They 
are safe for people of all ages, in any quan- 
tity. 

There is no over-dose as there is with so 
many cough drops. 

191 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

They do not taste disagreeable — quite like 
candy, in fact. 

We sell two ounces for 5c. You can have 
twenty-five pounds if you like. 

They're Black. 

When you need a lead pencil, you prefer one 
that will mark. 

Ours from the softest to the hardest — from 
No. 1 to No. 5 or 6H — are free from grit and 
will mark. 

Yes Sir, They're Black, 

and you'll like them. We have penny pen- 
cils that are not so good, but they are black, 
too. Throw away the old stub and get one 
of our good pencils for 5c. 

First A Cough 

to carry you off, 

Then a coffin 

to carry you off in. 

Don't let the cough get the upper 

hand. Keep it down. 

Even the little cough will become 

dangerous if it's neglected. 

192 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Get a bottle of our " Tolu, Tar and Cherry " 

cure while the cough is young. 

The cost is only a quarter. 

That quarter might be the means of saving 

you many dollars in doctor bills. 

We're The Borax People. 

The best borax in the world is the mule team 
brand. 

It is brought to us right from the big Cali- 
fornia borax lake; a lake with no water 
left in its bed. The bed is solid borax. 
We have a borax book that tells all about 
the uses of that valuable drug. It tells how 
it is obtained. The book is free. The borax 
is 20c a lb. 
Five pounds for 75c. 

This Weather Will Do It. 

That is, it will make a demand for our Witch 

Hazel Balm. 

Your hands will chap if they're not used to 

rough treatment. 

Who wants hands that roughen up and feel 

uncomfortable and even crack open enough 

to bleed? 

193 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

If you let them chap unhindered they will 

come to that. 

For 20c you can make your hands perfectly 

comfortable and stop the irritation that 

comes from chapping. 

Our Witch Hazel Balm is 20c. 

With Butter at 13 c. 

a pound the farmers feel pretty blue. 
Are you a farmer? Do you sell butter? 
We want you to see that your 13c will go far- 
ther at our drug store than at any other. 
We want to convince you by quoting prices 
on cattle salts. 

Epsom salts 5c lb. — 10 lb. 35c. 
Glauber (horse) salts 5c lb. — 10 lb. 30c. 
We can save you money on all the drugs you 
buy. 
Money saved is money earned. 

" Oh Frabjus Day, Calloo, Callay, he 
Chortled in his Joy." 
and so would you if you had a box of our 
Bronchial Lozenges in jouv pocket. 
They allay all irritations of the throat and 
bronchial tubes. 

194 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

You won't cough in church if you have a few 
of those lozenges to use as a preventive. 
Physicians prescribe them. 
No secret about them — the formula is on 
the box — 10c a box— big box, too. 

Tempus Fugit Were Here. 

If you want to go gunning for flies we have 

the ammunition. 

We have the guns and the powder both. 

Powder guns — 10c each (breech loading). 

Fly powder (insect powder) 50c a pound. 

That's the best Persian. 

You can use it without a powder gun, but it's 

cheaper to have one. 

We sell sticky and poison fly paper too — 

stickv 3 sheets for 5c. Poison, 5c a sheet. 

People Notice Envelopes. 

The first thing you notice about a letter is 
the envelope. 

Sometimes the impression made by that is 
too deep to be changed by the letter inside. 
Are your envelopes creating good impres- 
sions upon the people who get them, 

195 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Have you ever tried our blue bond business 

envelopes at 50c a box of 250? 

They are about as tidy looking as anything 

we sell. 

We sell all the standard kinds too. All sizes, 

from 1 to 14 in a dozen qualities. 

Just a Few 

reasons why you ought to use the tooth 
powder we make. 

not too soapy, 
It is 



free from grit, 



pure and harmless, 
pleasant to taste. 

Those are not all the reasons. Aside from 
the fact that you get nearly twice as much 
for a quarter as you do of other kinds, it is 
guaranteed to be entirely satisfactory or 
your money back. 

It will make your teeth shine like diamonds. 
Think of that — a mouth full of diamonds for 
only 25c. 

Don't Breathe Chalk Dust 

or allow children to do so. If you have a 
home blackboard for the youngsters or if 

196 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

they only use the one in the school room, see 

to it that dustless crayons and dustless 

erasers are used. 

A good dustless chalk that's free from grit. 

That's what you want — 10c a box, 3 for 25c 

— a gross in a box. 

Erasers that take up the dust instead of 

spreading it around the room — filling the 

air with it — 10c. Such erasers are health 

savers. 

In the Way of Soap. 

Ten cents may seem a small price to pay for 
a good perfumed soap. 
It is a small price. 
The soap is good though. 
It is as pure as the highest priced. 
In the ten cent (3 for 25c) grade we have 
Violet, Rose, Lilac, Lavender and Orris. 
Each cake nicely wrapped. Three cakes in a 
box. 

We have a glycerine soap at 15c — two cakes 
for a quarter. 

It is 33 1-3 per cent, glycerine. 
None better at any price. * 

Other fancy soaps at fancy prices. 
197 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Happy New Year ! 

We've had a good year and hope you have. 
If you haven't — or if you have — here's ho- 
ping that next year will be better. 
We want to thank every one of our custom- 
ers for their patronage and we want to ac- 
knowledge that it is our customers who 
make our business grow. 
If you are dissatisfied with any purchase 
made of us during the past year, come and 
say so. 

We are going to begin the new year square 
with everyone if it's a possible thing. 

Make Soap This Spring ? 

s We suppose there isn't much fun in making 

soft soap. 

Lots of things that aren't fun though, have 

to be done. 

You'll want concentrated lye. Try our 

brand. It beats all the rest, 2 to 1. 

It comes in zinc cans with patent sprinkle 

top, at 10c a can — 3 for 25c. 

You use only one can of ours where two cans 

of other makes are needed. That saves you 

money. 

198 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Remember these things when soft-soap day 
comes. 

Mellow Candy! 

Know what we mean? 

We mean that chocolate creams when first 
made — fresh chocolate creams — are not as 
good by far as they are when two or three 
weeks old. 

That's a fact. If a candy maker were to put 
out absolutely fresh creams he'd lose his 
reputation in two months. 
Many people want creams " made to-day." 
No candy man would be foolish enough to 
sell them though he might claim he was 
doing so. 

It may be a mistake for us to try to explain 
this. Perhaps it were better to allow the 
popular fallacy to go undisturbed. 
Anyway we buy only mellow chocolate 
creams and we believe that a trial will con- 
vince you that none beat ours. 40c lb. 

Bugs! 

Just now bugs are everywhere. They get 
into everything and on everything. They 
don't seem to know T any better. 
199 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

The bug killer for big bugs, little bugs and 

middle-sized bugs is our insect powder. 

It is the true Persian. Be sure we'll foist 

no imitation upon you. The price is 50c a 

pound. Powder guns — 10c each. 

Get an outfit if there are insects in your 

house or garden. 

Any Business Man, l 

every business man, in fact, uses some blank 
books. 

If you do an absolutely cash business (which 
you don't) you use a cash book and a few 
order or memorandum books. 
It doesn't matter anyway what book you 
want. 

We have them all from a vest pocket mem- 
orandum at lc or 25c up to a 500 page ledger 
or journal at 90c or $2.50. 
We keep ledgers too of 600, 800 and 1,000 
pages. 
We will save you money on blank books. 

Witch Hazel Extract. 

There is a standard of excellence for this as 
well as for everything else in a drug store. 
200 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Our extract is the best that money can buy. 
It contains 14 per cent, alcohol, the highest 
per cent, of any. 

It is a better liniment for simple sprains 
and bruises than a strong oily preparation, 
It is good wherever you've used Pond's Ex* 
tract and costs less than half as much. 
Chaps, chilblains, frost bite, sprains, etc. 
25c for a full pint bottle. 
Cheaper by the gallon. 

The National Recipe Book. 

Just a few words to say what it is. 
The pharmacists of the nation are repre- 
sented every ten years by a committee which 
goes over the U. S. Pharmacopoeia and 
makes such additions, subtractions or al- 
terations as are suggested by the advance in 
the science of pharmacy during that time. 
This book is accepted as the standard for all 
drugs and medicines. 

Preparations must be made no stronger, no 
weaker, than the U. S. P. calls for. 
The State board of health sends a repre- 
sentative occasionally to get samples of our 
stock for testing. 

201 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

We are proud to say that we have never yet 
been called to account for selling a product 
differing in any way from the standard. 

April Coughs. 

They are as bad as any. 
There's no cold like an April cold for ag- 
gravation. Our White Pine and Tar is a 
guaranteed cough cure, — guaranteed to cure 
the cough or you can have your money back. 
It helps all kinds of coughs in all kinds of 
weathers. 

It's good to take. No sickish taste — no af- 
ter effect of unpleasantness. 
" Simple and Efficient " best describes it. 
20c a bottle, 2 for 35c. 

Sp. Camphorae. 

That's the label on our big camphor bottle. 
We make our spirits of camphor of the exact 
strength required by the U. S. Formulary. 
We can make for you a stronger spirits if 
you want it, but there's only one regulation 
strength. 

The regular spirits we sell for 50c pt. It's 
strong enough for most people. The higher 

202 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

strength is simply more camphor gum to the 
pint. That's the difference. Camphor gum 
and alcohol are what make Sp. Camphorse. 

Oxford Bibles. 

They are the best Bibles. It's admitted by 
everybody. 

The type in an Oxford is as plain and easily 
read as type two sizes larger in any other 
print. 

We have all the cheaper grades, but they 
do not compare with the genuine Oxfords. 
If you are looking for a Christmas gift for 
Sunday school scholar or teacher, the Ox- 
ford is the thing. 

A real Oxford in leather binding with red 
thumb index, maps, references and concord- 
ence— $1.50. 
That's only one of our Bible bargains. 

Egg Dyes ! 

Easter is here — almost. 

Have you colored your Easter eggs? We 

have dyes on purpose in 5c packages. 

Each package colors a dozen different 

shades, — plain colors and mottled and 

203 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

stripes — yes, there are two or three dozen 
different combinations. 
Transfer pictures, too, of the Presidents and 
prominent soldiers and statesmen. 
These are all easy to use and please the chil- 
dren immensely. 

Don't wait until the last day in the after- 
noon. Buy a package now — 5c. 

Cold Cream, but not Ice Cream. 

For rough and chapped lips and face use our 

white rose cream. 

We've been selling it for five years. Never 

a jar brought back yet. 

We want people who don't like it better than 

any they ever had before to bring it back. 

We believe (with reason) that it beats them 

all. It is scented with the best imported 

rose water. It will not get rancid. Keeps 

forever. 15c for a jar — a w T hite porcelain 

jar with a neat label and a nickel screw cap. 

Drugs and Cigars. 

No drugs in our cigars. We don't mix the 
two. People who know generally buy their 
cigars at a drug store. 

204 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Druggists cannot sell a five cent cigar that 
costs them less than $35.00 or a ten cent one 
at less cost than $60.00. 
We pay more for many of ours. 
Drug store cigar customers demand better 
cigars than those who buy elsewhere. We 
don't know why. We only know that it is 
so. All our cigars are made by people who 
have a reputation to maintain. No wild- 
cat cigars in our case. 
Try one of the new brand — " Hemlock." 5c, 
6 for 25. 

How to Guard Checks. 

Every business man or woman writes checks. 
Nearly every check goes away from home 
and is handled by strangers before return- 
ing. What's to hinder it's being raised in 
amount? The average unguarded check 
could be raised easily without detection. 
Perhaps you've had them raised and didn't 
know it. A raise of a dollar or so at a time 
would not come to your notice. 
Better get a check perforator. They're 
down in price now, to $3.00. The price is 
205 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

not worth considering if it saves you from 

having a check raised. 

A perforated check is more business-like 

anyway. 

Nursing Bottles 
at new prices. 

You have been paying us — paying everyone 
— ten cents apiece for nursers without 
fittings. 

We are buying now at better prices; we'll 
give you the advantage of our advantage. 
5c each for straight or bent neck nursers, 
graduated to 8 ounces. 
These are an A 1 quality of flint glass. They 
will break if they fall on a stone. We guar- 
antee that. They will last better than most 
nursers though. 

About Blotters. 

There's as much difference in blotters as 
there is in people. 

If you get cheap blotting paper it will spread 
a blot instead of absorbing it. 
Get a good soft paper and then use it al- 
ways the same side up. 

206 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

The rubbing soon spoils the surface for ab- 
sorbing ink. So use one side for blotter 
and rub the other always. 
Blotters About 

the desk aren't apt to be too numerous. We 
sell small blotters for ten cents a dozen. 
Large sheets 20x26 for your desk or table 
10c a sheet; 3 for 25c. 

This is Good 

borax weather. So is any weather. 
Borax claims everything for itself. When 
you don't know what to use, try powdered 
borax. 

It will wash anything from laces to sore 
eyes. Good for sore mouth and sore throat. 
We have a little book that tells how to use 
this drug in medicine, household and laun- 
dry. We're giving them away to everybody. 
The book is free, but the borax is 20c a 
pound and it's all one grade — pure. Right 
from the California borax lake to our store 
in original cases. 

207 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Book Bargains ! 

We have a big stock of 50c 16 nios. that we 

want to sell for 25c each. 

A 16 mo. is about 6 1-2 by 4 1-2 inches in 

size. 

These books have handsome illuminated 

silk vellum covers. They are well printed on 

good paper with plenty of illustrations. 

Nice for all sorts of gifts for we have all 

sorts of books in this edition. 

Easy to send away. Book postage is cheap, 

you know. 

Potato Bugs are Ripe. 

Save your potatoes with early paris green. 
When the bugs come they come with a rush. 
Be ready for them. They're on hand in some 
places now. 

Nothing like being ready before the bugs 
are ready. Our paris green stock is all 
ready. It's the best green we can get. No- 
body has any that's better. 
25c a pound; 15c a half pound; quarters, 
8c ; 5 lbs for a dollar. 
Nobody has any better prices. Our stock 

208 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

is so big that we want you to buy all you 
need the first trip. If you don't use it all 
we'll buy it back if you bring it before Au- 
gust first. That's fair. 

The October Magazines. 

We cannot give the contents of all the maga- 
zines here, but we can and do ask you to 
come to our store and look at the table of 
contents of every magazine on the counter. 
The October numbers are especially attract- 
ive. 

Their covers are a match for the autumnal 
colors. The contents are worthy the covers. 
Good short stories; good serials and good 
verse. Something to suit everyone. 

Skip Easy Street 

unless you have money to burn. 

There aren't any quick roads to wealth. 

You must save to get there. You must work 

and save. 

If you try to live on Easy Street before you 

get the price, you will die a pauper. 

Here's the point. Cheap buying saves you 

money. 

209 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Our cough cure is the best that skill and 

good drugs will make. It contains White 

Pine and Tar combined with some other good 

things. 

The price is 20c. Just 5c less than the same 

size of other kinds cost. 

None so Blind as Those Who Can't See 
that our way means money for you as well 
as money for us. 

Our way is — your money back on any pur- 
chase that's the least bit unsatisfactory. It's 
money for you because you can't lose. You 
never have to keep goods that you think are 
not worth the price you paid. 
It's money for us because it gives us satis- 
fied customers. 

There's no advertisement so good as a satis- 
fied customer. 

A dissatisfied one is a nail in your business 
coffin. 

Outside and Inside. 

Our advice for this wet winter weather is — 
keep dry outside and use our Cod Liver Oil 
Emulsion iiiside. 

210 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

The emulsion is the great cold preventive. 

It makes you strong to resist the effects of 

January's climatic changes. 

One ounce of prevention is worth tons of 

cure. 

For a chronic cough and cold that lowers 

the vitality, Cod Liver Oil is your doctor's 

prescription. It builds up the system. 

Helps you to fight the weatlier and the 

" grip," 48c for a 12 ounce bottle. It's 

pleasant to take. 

Make Money on School Books. 
Money saved is money earned. 
Second-hand school books are often as good 
as the new ones. 

They will la.st as long as they're needed. We 
sell them for one half the price of new ones. 
Another thing! There's no good of your 
saving your own old books. 
They go out of date in a year. 
Bring them in and if we can use them we'll 
take them in exchange for whatever you 
want, allowing you about half of what you 
paid for them. 

211 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

For the Last Day 

before Christmas we have a big stock of 
books ready. There are always some pres- 
ents left for selection at the last moment. 
Then you will decide that a book is best 
after all. 

It's easy to choose a book too. We have such 
a variety that you can fit any sort of a 
person. 

We keep our book stock up until the last 
because that stock is good at any time. 
They are right in our regular line. It 
doesn't matter how many we have left over. 

Picture Frames to Burn. 

We have a splendid lot of cheap cabinet 
frames. 

They are good Christmas presents, if they 
are cheap. A little money goes far in photo- 
graph frames. 

If you want an expensive frame — silver and 
that sort of thing — we have those too. 
Just now we want to say that our cheaper 
ones at 5c, 10c, 15c are mighty pretty frames 
212 






FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

and will fill the bill in lots of places where 
you don't care to send an expensive gift. 

Cheap Perfumes are No Good. 

We are free to say that cheap perfumery 
cannot be good perfumery. 
The cheap odors smell like flavoring ex- 
tracts. As a matter of fact cheap Carnation 
pink is mostly essence of cloves. 
Taste of the first cheap carnation you find. 
You can test it for yourself. 
We can sell you some good odors at com- 
paratively low prices — low prices when the 
quality is considered. 

Prices are not more important than quality. 
Quality has first call. 

Our line of good odors is a 50c an ounce 
line. The best ones are 75c an ounce. 

Black Ink is Black. 

Some of it is and again some of it isn't. 
You want the sort that is. You want it to 
last. Ink that will fade is no ink. 
We are selling Underwood's inks for our 
213 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

best. They are so good that they are 
used by the government officers in Eng- 
land. 

Our county officials use them. They write 
black, they stay black. No fade when you 
buy ink from us. 

5c bottles; 50c bottles (pints) ; 75c bottles 
(quarts). 

We Keep Sponges. 

The little bits of barber sponges. 
The middle-sized bath sponges. 
The great big wagon sponges. 
See that you always have a good sponge 
around in summer for cleaning purposes. 
The uses of sponges are endless and vary 
from washing windows to bailing out the 
boat. 

The unbleached sponges are what you want 
for rough work. The light colored ones are 
bleached. Bleaching weakens the sponge 
fibre. 

We sell a good general utility sponge for 
25c. Bath sponges from ten cents up. 
214 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Muscle Brace. 

Good blood makes good muscle timber. It 
takes exercise to develop that timber. We 
can't do that for you. 

You must have the material or you can't 
work up the muscle. 

Beef, wine and iron is the starter. It makes 
the foundation. It makes blood — red blood 
too. 

It gives you ambition to get started. Noth- 
ing like getting a good early start. 
Our Beef, wine and iron is made of the best 
beef extract, the purest citrate of iron and a 
carefully selected Sherry wine. 

A Solid Back 

is the best back for a hair brush. The glued 

backs will separate if the brush is wet very 

often. 

It's best to keep hair brushes dry, but no 

one does. 

Get a solid back brush and wet it as often as 

you like. 

We sell solid back brushes at 30c and from 

there up to $1.50. 

215 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

More bristles in the good ones, better bristles 
too, 50c gets a good serviceable brush. We 
have the glued back and aluminum combi- 
nation backs, but we swear by the solid back. 

Not Always for Babies. 

Baby powder — Talcum powder is not al- 
ways for babies. More used for adults than 
for children. 

It's good on all chafed or irritated surfaces. 
If you've never used it, you've missed much. 
If you try it you will wonder how you ever 
got along without it. 

The Violet perfumed talcum is the nicest 
for the toilet — 25c a can. 
We have the borated and carbolated as well 
as the plain at 15c and 10c. 

Here Comes the Army 

of currant worms. 

Have you loaded your hellebore guns? You 
can have currant worms and no currants 
or currants and no currant worms. The 
two together you cannot have. 

216 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

It's easy to drive off these pests if you get 

an early start. 

Sprinkle them good as soon as they appear. 

Sprinkle them again after the rain. Keep 

watch for the new crop. 

You know all about it though. What you 

didn't know is that we are giving you a 

sprinkler top can and a pound of hellebore 

for 25c. 

For Fancy Work 

of any sort, plain tissue paper or crepe tis- 
sue, are valuable. 

The use of tissue paper, particularly the 
crepe, has increased greatly within a year 
or so. 

The things to be made from a good French 
crepe tissue such as we sell are innumerable. 
Lamp shades, which most everyone can 
make, are only one item in a long list. 
Fancy dresses for children are easily made. 
The crepe paper possesses greater strength 
than you would suppose. 
Our assortment of the paper is sufficiently 
217 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

varied to meet all tastes. Plain tissue, 2c a 
sheet. Crepe in plain colors, 10c a roll ; with 
border, 20c a roll. 

In Selecting a Tooth 
powder, be careful ! 

Look out for acids that whiten the teeth at 
the expense of the teeth. 
Your teeth will wear out fast enough with- 
out your using injurious acids upon them. 
Don't use a gritty tooth powder. Marble 
dust would be as good and would cost less 
money. 

You can buy our powder, pure and smooth ; 
pleasant to the taste as well; for 10c an 
ounce or 25c for a large bottle with a 
sprinkle top. 

Betsy Brown Nursers. 

We have a nursing bottle with a metal rim 
outside of the glass neck. 
Put the nipple over the neck, screw down 
that rim and the nipple cannot pull off. 
That's the Betsy Brown of it. 
218 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

10c for each bottle. They are graduated to 

8 oz. 

They're made of the best flint glass — thicker 

glass than the cheaper bottles. 

We sell the other bottles in straight and 

bent necks for 5c each. 

Economy Gone Wrong 

Don't economize on your health. 
Economize on diamonds if you want to, but 
get the best when you buy medicine. 
Be sure of your druggist and then take his 
word for his drugs. 

We know our drugs are right. In some in- 
stances w T e have to charge more than cheap 
drugs would cost, but you are the gainer by 
it. 

When we put our name on a package of 
drugs it guarantees the quality. 

Castile Soap. 

for the millions. We have a proposition that 
is selling one cake of castile soap to all of 
our customers — more to some of them. 
219 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

We give a 4 oz. cake of pure castile, white 
or green — wrapped in a good wash cloth, all 
for ten cents. 

The soap is pure. We stake our reputation 
on that. The price is low and we charge you 
nothing for the wash rag. 
It's in our buying that we gain the advant- 
age enabling us to do this. 
Don't confound this with the cheap wash 
cloth soaps. 
This is a pure Castile. 

The Year Begins. 

Don't be behind when the year begins. Start 
right and start with a diary. There's more 
comfort and convenience in one good diary 
than in a dozen ordinary pocket memoran- 
dums. 

You have the whole year all dated before 
vou. A diarv doesn't mean that you must 
set down in it every night what you've been 
doing all day. 

It means a place to put business or social 
appointments — bills and notes due and any 
220 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

sort of memoranda that may prove valuable 
for reference. A complete almanac and 
postal guide in each diary. An almanac 
right in your pocket whenever you need it. 
From 15c to $1.50. 

Artists' Pencils 

Have you found trouble in getting drawing 
pencils to suit? We have a full line of the 
artists' Dixon graphite pencils. 
All degrees of hardness or softness from 
ws to vvv H. It's a long way between too. 
If you use pencils for drafting, for sketch- 
ing, for retouching negatives — for any pur- 
pose at all, you will appreciate our stock. 
Drawing paper is part of our line too, so 
is tracing paper. 

To Help You Remember. 

Our memorandum books — or rather, one of 
them would serve to remind you of whatever 
you are likely to forget. 
When you spend a dollar, 

set it down. 
221 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

When you lend a dollar, 

set it down. 

Whatever you do to use up money, 

set it down. 

People who set things down are winners. 
Our vest pocket memorandum books are 
easy to carry — 5c to 25c. We have the 
bigger books with pockets and without, in- 
dexed and plain — all sorts, sizes and prices. 
Butchers' books, grocers' books and time 
books. 

Letter Writer's Sealing Wax. 

Sealing wax is growing in popularity, espe- 
cially with feminine correspondents. 
We have dainty little sticks of perfumed 
wax in all the colors and shades of note 
paper, azure, silver grey, bronzes, blues, 
etc. 

We can please you sure. 
8c a stick. 25c for a box of four sticks. 
Initial seals in stock too — all the letters of 
the alphabet — 25c each. 
222 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Dental Floss. 

Lots of people don't know about it. 
When you get an obstruction between the 
teeth and the tooth pick will not touch it, 
then you wish you had some dental floss. 
It is silk and it's strong. 
It saves discomfort to carry a spool in the 
pocket always. It will save dentist's bills 
too. 

It is a little thing to write an ad about, but 
we want you to know that there is such a 
good thing to be had. Ten cents buys a spool 
that you can carry easily. 

Baking Soda. 

What is in the baking soda you use? Do 
you ever wonder if it's pure? Are you buy- 
ing it where they know what it's made of — 
what it might be adulterated with? 
Perhaps there's a goodly per cent, of car- 
bonate (sal soda) in it; perhaps it is part 
sulphate (Glauber salts) . Those are two of 
the commonest adulterants. 
Can your grocer detect those impurities? 
223 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

We can tell whether ours is right or wrong. 
We test every package that comes into the 
store. If it's not O. K. we do not keep it. 
Our price is no more than anybody's — 10c a 
pound. 

Oil of Castor. 

Every household uses castor oil occasionally. 
Most farmers and teamsters use it — a cheap 
grade — for axle grease. 
We keep two sorts — the medicinally pure 
and the coarser sort. 

The household, medicinal kind is the 
cleanest, purest, best oil made. 30c a pint. 
Nothing in it but belongs there. 
The other oil is thicker, heavier, and pos- 
sesses great durability. 
It's only 20c a pint. It wears longer than 
any other axle lubricant you can get. 

Household Spices 

at household prices. 

The fruit season brings its canning and pick- 
ling time. Preserves to be preserved and 
pickles to be pickled. Into the pickles go 
lots of spices. 

224 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

The spice business is something we haven't 
pushed before. Just recently we have put 
in a good line of ground spices of all sorts ; 
mace, cloves, cinnamon, curcuma or tur- 
meric, etc. These came from a manufac- 
turer of essential oils who secures for his 
business the best spices that grow. 
The oil has not been extracted from these 
spices as it often has from the cheaper 
grades. Our prices are scarcely any higher 
than you've paid before for worse goods. 

Standard Books at Startling Prices. 

A new lot of 500 12 mos. has come to our 
store. Over 400 titles. 

Every book bound in good cloth with name 
on back and front of cover. 
All the best works of all the best authors. 
Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Dumas, Weyman, 
Doyle. Those are representative names. 
If you cannot find a book to suit it won't 
be because we haven't enough variety. 
These books are 20c each or six for a dollar. 
Get them now and lay them aside for Christ- 
mas. There will be less variety then. 

225 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

There's Odds in Ginger. 

That's an old saying never yet denied. When 

you're buying ginger, buy it from us. Our 

ginger is the best. 

We are ginger judges. 

We use particular care in getting the best, 

for the best is what our customers want. 

We buy of people who have a reputation for 

pure drugs. 

We sell our ginger for the same price that 

you've paid for a poorer grade. 

Quinine $23.00 an Ounce! 

How would you like that? That's a war 

time price. It is high enough now — 60c an 

ounce, but that's a drop of $22.40. 

Our quinine is a better article too than that 

war time quinine. 

If you buy two grain quinine pills we'll 

charge you 5c a doz., 35c a hundred for the 

best in the world. 

The most successful way of taking quinine 

— the way that gives surest results is to use 

the soluble elastic capsules. They are 10c 

a dozen for the two grain size. 

226 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Our Soda Glasses 

are as clean as glass can be made. We buy 
them in barrel lots — always enough clean to 
last through a rush. The dirty ones are 
washed not merely rinsed. We take our 
time at washing them too. 

Cold! 

Every glass comes right out of a 34 degree 

temperature to be used. 

This adds to the chill of our cold soda. 

Warm soda is bad soda. 

Good soda is cold soda. 

Have you tried our new " Mint Fizz? " 

Health to Spare ? 

No one has health to spare. Don't take 

chances with your health. 

Look out for places around your house 

where disease germs might hide. 

Use lots of disinfectant. The low price of 

it gives no one an excuse for negligence. 

Copperas — 5c a pound — 10 lb for 30c. 

That's the cheapest thing. 

Chloride of lime in 5c, 10c, 15c, zinc cans 

227 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

with sprinkle tops is good, and it's easy to 

use. 

Piatt's chlorides cost more and are nicest 

to use indoors ; 50c a bottle. 

Cleaning Time. 

Men never see the use of house-cleaning. 
It's a habit. Women don't see the use of 
smoking, but that doesn't deter men from 
using tobacco. 

All of which has nothing to do with the fact 
that we are selling the best household am- 
monia ever made for 10c per bottle. 
It contains a larger per cent, of ammonia 
than most of them and will clean everything 
about the house. 

Ten cents a bottle and directions on the 
bottle. 

A Strong Vanilla. 

If you buy cheap vanilla, you get an extract 
made from what are known as Tonka beans. 
It is all right if you like Tonka — nothing 
harmful about it, but Tonka beans are not 
vanilla and never will be. They are a cheap, 

228 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

rank substitute. Vanilla beans are worth 
now about flG.OO a pound. Tonka beans 
are worth f 1.00 a pound. 
Our best vanilla is all vanilla — no Tonka. 
We have a cheap extract which is a mixture 
of the two and we sell it for just what it is. 
You pay for what you get. The best is 10c 
an ounce, the other 5c. 

Peppermint and Wintergreen. 

Those two flavors deserve separate mention. 
We make them both just as the U. S. Phar- 
macopoeia (the national recipe book) directs. 
That means that they are full strength. No 
attempt on our part to increase our profit 
at the expense of quality. 
Try essences from our store and see if they 
do not go farther than the ready made, ready 
bottled kind. 

Our wintergreen is nearly colorless — that's 
the way it should be. 

Our peppermint is a rich dark green — that's 
the way it should be. 

Our price is 5c an ounce. We sell only in 
bulk — that's the way it should be. 

229 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

For Chapped Hands, 

lips, face, or any roughness of the skin, why 

not try our Velvet Cream? 

It is no new thing — we have sold it for years 

with perfect satisfaction to us and to the 

buyers. 

You can put on gloves after using it. It is 

not sticky or greasy. We guarantee it, you 

know. 

Price, 22c per bottle. 

If you buy it once you'll buy it again. 

Tooth Supplies. 

Everyone uses tooth powder, tooth brushes 
and tooth picks. 

We sell the powder in bulk for ten cents an 
ounce. 

We sell too, all of the well known powders, 
pastes and washes. 

Tooth brushes from 5c to 50c. A guaran- 
teed, four row, all French bristle brush for 
25c. If the bristles come out, the quarter is 
yours again. 

Toothpicks, large packages, 5c ; small pack- 
ages (Japanese) 10c. 
Quill toothpicks, 5c a bunch. 

230 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Styles in Soap ? 

Well there is such a thing as stylish soap. 
We sell it too. 

The stylish soaps are not cheap. That is 
not their attraction. 

We are talking about Roger and Gallet's, 
Colgate's and other good people's soap. 
Roger and Gallet's cost more than any other 
kind. They take second place for no per- 
fumed soaps made. 
Savon a la Violette. 

Savon Heliotrope Blanc, and several more — 
only 25c a cake. We can go higher on other 
grades. 

Colgate's Cashmere Boquet at 18c and 27c. 
We call these stylish soaps because stylish 
people buy them, as much as for any reason. 

Children's Books. 

There's always a picture book to be bought 
for the baby, even when the baby is a baby 
no more. 

We have the linen books that won't tear, 
with pictures the baby can't lick off. They 
are 5c and 10c. Plenty of bigger books with 

231 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

board covers and lots of pictures at 5c, 10c, 
15c, 20c, 25c. 

We have some of the handsome new high 
priced juveniles at higher prices. Plenty 
of story books for older children. 

Dainty Perfumes for Dainty People. 

Our violet is the best violet. 
That statement alone probably does not con- 
vince you. Everybody tells about that same 
story. 

Here's how you can tell that we are saying 
what's so. 

Bring in your bottle and buy a trial supply 
if it's only ten cents' worth. 
Take the perfume home and try it. Use it 
all up, we don't care. Bring the bottle 
back and get some more if you liked it. 
Throw the bottle away and come and get 
your ten cents if you didn't like it. 
That's the way we sell our violet — or any 
other perfume. We take the chances. 

Picture Books for Grown Ups. 

We have a new stock of handsome illustra- 
232 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

ted holiday books at all prices from five 
cents to five dollars. 

The five cent ones are little illuminated 
booklets, just remembrances to take the 
place of Christmas cards. 
The better books are all the much advertised 
books of travel and the new Gibson and 
Wenzell books at a quarter off from publish- 
er's prices. 

They are well worth seeing. 
In our window this week. 

Drug Store Tobaccos 

are generally better tobaccos than those 

bought elsewhere. 

The drug store patrons want better tobaccos, 

that's why. 

Smokers go naturally to the druggist for a 

good smoke. 

We have a new imported tobacco — Latakia 

— put up in 2 oz. tins with double lids to 

keep the tobacco in good condition. 

Every can sells for 25c. 

Every buyer buys again. 

It's as near harmless as tobacco can be be- 

233 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

cause it's pure. If you must use poison, use 
it pure. 

When the Whistle Blows, 

just remember what it was your wife 
wanted you to bring home from the drug 
store. 

In this rough March weather most every- 
one's wife wants a bottle of our Velvet 
Cream for chapped hands and face. 
It is a niighty pleasant lotion at a mighty 
pleasant price; 15c for the same size bottle 
that costs a quarter in other kinds. 
If you don't like it you get your 15c back 
again for saying so and nobody is dis- 
gruntled. 

We're always cheerful about that money 
back business. 

Makes Your Back Lame 

to get out these spring days and dig around 
in the garden, doesn't it? 
It's good for you though. Good for the 
garden too, probably. 

Your appetite grows doubtless, and as for 
234 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

the lameness, one of our strengthening 
plasters 

Makes Your Back Well 

in a day and a night. 

It costs you only 20c and you feel like an- 
other man. You will want to weed gardens 
all the while. 

Smith Invites You 

to his new store. 

There's all in a good start. We want to 
start right. We can't get everybody's trade, 
though we admit we would like to. 
We only ask you to try us. Our hope is 
that we'll give you such service and satis- 
faction that you'll keep coming. 
Of course our goods are fresh. We are not 
going to run a " cut rate " store but we can 
save you some money. 

Above everything we intend to please every 
customer or give that customer's money 
back. We intend to do business on that 
plan — if you're not satisfied the money is 
yours. 

235 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

According to Hoyle. 

We keep playing cards and books on whist. 

Hoyle's " Games " and all the standard 

works. 

Our playing card stock is always full. Lots 

of variety in backs and prices. 

Indian Backs 

are the lucky ones now. 
40c a pack for the art back cards. " Bi- 
cycles " in great variety at 20c. 
" Steamboats/' 10c. 

The bicycle card is a good all-round card. 
Try it at your whist table. 

Here's Your Tally 

card stock for euchre, whist or " hearts " 
parties. We have the cards and we have the 
gold, red and green seals and stars. 
Tally cards in fancy bicycle, golf and other 
designs. 

Speaking of golf — we have golf score cards 
too. Tally cards, 5c to 50c a dozen; seals, 
10c a box. Golf score cards, 5c per pkg. 
Playing cards for all known games and for 
many games not yet discovered. 
236 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Hello, Camera Fiends! 

Do you develop your own negatives? 

How is the " hypo " you've been using? 

Have you tried our granular hyposulphite of 

soda? 

It is made by the patent Tremley process. 

Dissolves much more readily than the old 

crystal form. It is purer too. 

Costs no more — costs less than some sell 

crystals for. 10c a pound ; 5 lb for 35c. We 

have all the other photo stuff. 

About Cream Tartar. 

Cream of tartar is made from the crude de- 
posit in the bottom of wine casks. The 
original stuff is called " argols." 
There are just two American cream of tartar 
manufacturers. When they agree, up goes 
the price. When they disagree, down goes 
the price. 

The grape crop of France affects the price 
too. 

We bought a case while the makers quar- 
reled. 
Our price while this lasts is 35c a pound, 

237 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

This is the pure article, just as it came from 
the factory — no adulteration of the drugs or 
food stuffs we sell. 

Talcum Talk. 

You know what talcum is probably. Noth- 
ing but purified French chalk — but it must 
be pure. 

Powders to be used on chafed, irritated sur- 
faces must contain nothing that can prove 
injurious. 

If the powder is put up in tin, the tin must 
be the best tin. Tin sometimes contains im- 
purities. 

Our talcum is pure. It is put up in pure tin 
boxes. It is finely perfumed with violet. 
The price is 18c. 

Don't Cover Your Face 

with a newspaper when you take a nap. 
Get a few sheets of fly paper and you won't 
be bothered with flies. 

We sell the sticky fly paper at 2c a sheet, 
40c for a box of twenty-five sheets. Is that 
cheap enough? 

238 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

Poison fly paper — the old reliable Dutcher's 

— 5c per sheet. 

One sheet goes a long way. 

Insect powder 50c a pound. 

That's a fly killer too. 

All the New Magazines 

are on our counters as soon as they are pub- 
lished. If they're out they're here. 
Of course you know the prices — same every- 
where. 

We take subscriptions to any periodical pub- 
lished at regular rates. 

If you aren't in the habit of looking over 
our magazine stock once or twice a month 
or week, just form that habit. You will find 
that you've been missing a lot of good things. 
Big line of paper novels too. 10c each. 

"What done it?" 

" Rum done it." 
Bay rum at that. 

Our bay rum is of two kinds : domestic and 
imported. The domestic is the best domes- 
tic — the imported is the best imported; — it 
is really imported too. 

239 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

The domestic is made up with alcohol, and 

the imported is made with rum. 

That is one difference between the two. 

The domestic is 40c a pint. 

The imported is 65c a pint. 

Better not try the imported unless you can 

afford to use it always. It spoils the liking 

for the cheaper grade. 

Does Your Wagon Sponge Leak ? 

We have a new bale of wagon sponges. 
We save 10$ by buying in bales. 
You get the advantage of that saving. 
10$ in our cost means 15$ in the cost to 
you, with the same per cent, profit to us. 
Natural sheepswool sponges for wagon use, 
at 35c. They are the toughest of the tough. 
They cost a little more than the cheap 
grades, but they're cheaper in the end. 
We'll save you money on any grade. 

Correct Stationery. 

It is worth something to buy your stationery 
where the styles are correct. 

240 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

We buy direct from the maker. No mid- 
dleman to work off his dead stock on us as 
" the latest thing." 

We keep abreast of the times. We know 
what's right. Our prices are as right as our 
styles. 

Prices all the way from ten cents to a dollar 
per box. 
Pound packages at ounce prices. 

Who Rolls Your Pills ? 

Did you think all pills were made the same, 
— all quinine pills, for instance? 
No more so than all flour is alike. 
Some manufacturers make quinine pills of 
no more medicinal value than sawdust pills 
would be. 

We use the greatest care in buying all our 
pills (other drugs no less) and know that 
they are right. 
They will dissolve. 

If your physician prescribes pills — come to 
us. Our pills are all fresh. Stale pills be- 
come insoluble. 

241 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

Have You Friends Abroad ? 

When you get ready to write to them you 
will want our " foreign mail " stationery. 
We have that paper in boxes at 25c ; by the 
quire at 10c a quire, and in tablets at 10c. 
The envelopes are 10c a package. 
This isn't a cheap paper. It is a real linen 
bond and standard stock. 
You need it for foreign letters because post- 
age abroad is 5c for a half ounce. 
You need a light weight paper. 

Cotton for Medicine. 

We don't mean for internal use, but for ban- 
dages, applications to wounds, sores, burns, 
etc. For applying medicines to the eyes and 
nostrils. 

Since the cotton is to be used on raw sur- 
faces, it is very important that it should con- 
tain no impurities. It needs to be chemi- 
cally pure just as much as if it were to go 
into the stomach. 

Our cotton is put up in sealed packages. 
We sell it only by the package — from 5c to 
60c. When you get a package you know it's 

242 



FOR DRUGGISTS AND STATIONERS 

right, it's never been opened. Don't buy a 
cheap cotton and take chances. 

A Special Blue. 

We have a special blue in fine box paper. 

It's the prettiest shade ever made. 

We know you'll like it. It is the correct size 

and shape. 

The envelopes have a look of style to them 

when ready to mail. Style counts for much 

in stationery. 

People will be glad to get letters from you 

on that paper, if they are ever so brief. 

The price too is satisfactory to buyers — 23c 

for a box that lots of dealers ask 35c for. 

Our window is full of the papers — have a 

look at it. 

Keep Horses ? 

People who keep horses have to give them 
medicine at times. If you have many horses 
you have to use a good deal of medicine in 
the course of a year. 

Glauber salts, or horse salts are the common 
physic for horses and cattle. 

243 



RETAIL ADVERTISING 

We'll sell you Glauber salts for 5c a pound, 

or ten pounds for 35c. 

Better buy ten pounds. It will come handy 

sometime or other. 

The salts are pure — all our drugs are pure. 

Butter Color in Bulk. 

If you make butter you are interested in 
saving money on the color you use. 
We sell Thatcher's, Hansen's, and Wells, 
Richardson & Co.'s by the ounce, pint or gal- 
lon. The first and last named are 50c a pint. 
Hansen's is 60c. We think one is as good 
as another, but every butter maker has a 
preference. 

When you buy one of the dollar bottles put 
up by the maker you get as much as would 
cost you 50c or perhaps 60c in bulk. 
Bring your bottle and let us fill it. 



244 



THE ART OF SELLING 

LAWS GOVERNING SALES 

ETC. 

A BOOK FOR ALL BUSINESS MEN 

By F. B. Goddard 

i2mo, flexible cloth, 50 cents 

In this book the author discusses secrets of the accom- 
plished and successful salesman, illustrates his tact and 
finesse, and tells how he masters men. But beyond 
this, the work embraces much information which will 
be instructive and useful to all classes of business men, 
discusses fully the characteristic methods of conducting 
business to-day, and makes an interesting application 
of character-reading to the work of business negotia- 
tions. 

Critical Notices 

" 'The Art of Selling ; is much more than an ordinary 
book. It is ably and faithfully written, and will be 
cordially welcomed by business men everywhere. Its 
tone is elevating and its influence will be excellent. 
We bespeak for it an extensive sale." — N. Y. Dry 
Goods Chronicle. 

" c The Art of Selling ' deserves to be regarded as a vade 
mecum by persons desirous of educating themselves to 
become successful salesmen or saleswomen. The au- 
thor's suggestions are copious and to the point." 

—■ N. Y. Sun. 

The Baker & Taylor Co., Publishers 

33-37 E. 17th Street, Union Square North, New York 



BAKER 6° TAYLOR CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 

A New Book by Josiah Strong* 

EXPANSION 

UNDER NEW WORLD-CONDITIONS. 

i2mo, cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents. 

With the same exceptional qualities which insured a dis- 
tribution of more than 170,000 copies of " Our Country," 
Dr. Strong has taken up the great theme of Expansion. His 
book sparkles with striking and original thoughts, put in 
the most captivating way. The reader pursues the argument 
with breathless interest from chapter to chapter, and hurries 
through the most astonishing revelations of our nation's re- 
sources, growth and present-day power and stature to a 
brilliant summary of our relations at the century's dawn to 
other countries, and to the great questions that confront the 
nation under the new world-conditions of to-day. 

" The character, history and operations of the various forces 
combined in the movement toward expansion are described 
in the nine successive chapters of this little volume with all 
that argumentative skill and power, with all that masterful 
arrangement of statistical information, for which Dr. Strong 
has become justly famous." — Christian Work. 

" Dr. Strong makes a clear statement of the changed world- 
conditions which render our former policy of isolation no 
longer practicable. The Anglo-Saxon race cannot refuse to 
take its place in the closer world-relationship which is to 
come." — The Outlook. 

" Mr. Strong would have us dismiss ' the craven fear of 
being great/ recognize the place in the world which God 
has given us, and accept the responsibilities which it de- 
volves upon us in behalf of a Christian civilization. The 
book is one of the strongest statements of the expansion 
doctrine that we have seen. It will convince many because it 
clings to ideals while keeping an eye on the cold facts." — 
Public Opinion. 

Sent, postpaid, on receipt of the price, by 

THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO., PUBLISHERS, 
33-37 E. 17th St., Union Sq. North, New York. 



BAKER & TAYLOR CO/S PUBLICATIONS. 
What Review Writers say about 

The Trusts: 

What Can We Do with Them ? 

What Can They Do for Us? 

BY HON. WILLIAM MILLER COLLIER, 

i2mo, 348 pages, Cloth, $1.25 ; Paper, 50 cents. 

The book is of very great value. Its facts are carefully col- 
lected and arranged, and its arguments clear, pointed and 
convincing. It is, without doubt, the best analysis of the 
entire situation that has been made. — Chicago Inter-Ocean. 

An eminently fair, able and satisfactory discussion of the 
subject. The author has a trained mind, sees great facts in a 
broad way, is fair-minded and reasons clearly and strongly. — 
Indianapolis Journal 

This, is one of the best books on the subject of trusts that 
has appeared. It warrants the conclusion that the author 
has written not merely to make a volume which should be 
carried on the tide of the hour, but because he has some- 
thing of value and interest to say. The work is thoroughly 
sane, which is a high commendation. — Mikvaukce Sentinel. 

We do not know where one could find all these facts else- 
where in the same compass. The distinguishing feature of 
the volume is its purely scientific treatment, independently 
of all political considerations. It is a treatise on trade and 
manufactures, and incidentally of all questions as effecting 
cost of production, profits, competition and monopoly, and it 
is wholly fair and free from partisan feeling or prejudice. — 
Los Angeles Herald. 

It is refreshing to come across a book on the subject of 
trusts which is at once so intelligent and so sensible and 
judicious as Mr. Collier's,, The characteristic thing about 
the author is that he not only defines his .erms carefully, but 
uses them honestly. On the whole, this book by Mr. Collier 
is the most fair-minded and reasonable discussion of trusts 
that we have seen. — Chicago Tribune. 



THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO. 

Publishers and Jobbers of 

Library and School Books. 

Being Special Agents for many of the largest publishers, and 
keeping in stock a full line of the Publications of all the principal 
houses in the United States, we make it a Special Business to fill our 
customers 1 orders with accuracy and dispatch, and at the lowest 
market rates. Our facilities are exceptional for filling orders from 
Libraries and Public and Private Schools, and our stock of Library 
and School Books is selected with reference to supplying that demand. 

We carry in stock a full line of the Publications of 

Houghton, Mifflin «fe Co., 
Harper &, Brothers, 

H. 8. Stone ife Co., 

D. Appleton «fc Co., 

Charles Scrfbner'g Sons, 

Little, Brown & Co., 

Dana Estes & Co., 
The Century Co., Longmans, Green «fc Co., 

G. P. Putnam's Sons, The Macmillan Co., 

A. C. MeClurg & Co., 

J. B. Lippincott Co., 
Lee «fc Shepard, 

T. Y. Crowell & Co., 
Lothrop Pub. Co., 

John Wiley & Sons. 

H. T. Coates & Co., and others. 

We are Special Agents for the following School 
Book Publishers: 



Allyn «fc Bacon, 

D. C. Heath «fc Co., 

Eldredge «fe Brother, 

Scott, Foresmasi &. Co., 
Charles Collins, 



Ginn & Co., 

Thos. R. Shewell «fe Co., 
B. H. Sanborn A: Co., 
Sibley & Dueker, 

George K. Lockwood. 



Our general Catalogue of School Books, with net and mail- 
ing prices and a telegraphic code, will be sent 7ipon application. 
Letters of inquiry, with reference to prices and other matters of 
interest to purchasers, will receive prompt attention. 

THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO., 

Publishers and Booksellers, 
33-37 Eavt Seve teenth. St., New York. 



NOV Ifi 1901 



